The Wii's News Channel went live a day early it seems.  I downloaded the upgrade and checked it out.  It's similiar to the forecast channel in that it has the nifty globe, but I don't really see it as being as useful as the forecast channel because it's limited to just AP stories and reading news on a TV set just isn't very entertaining, despite the clean interface and ease of changing font sizes.  At least it appears to update more frequently than the forecast channel.

Sucks they use the Mercator projection map though... that's so irritating.

What would you have them use?

I actually quite like the Wii news feature.  It actually might be my favorite of the non-game-related channels so far.  I find the interface perfectly suited for running through the day's news before I head to bed every day.

Peters projection map - it's far more accurate (allocating the correct proportional map space to each land mass).  Even though there could never be a perfect map, the Mercator projection just looks silly, consider the following: 

- Try this, draw two diagonal lines from NW corner to SE corner and NE corner to SW corner and see where the lines intercept.  The map places Western Europe is at the very center of the map... (???)
- Europe DWARFS South America
- Greenland DWARFS Africa, despite the fact that Greenland is only 800,000 sqaure miles compared to Africa's 11.7 million square miles.
- Russia dwarfs Africa, despite being about only half it's size.
- The land mass in the entire northern hemisphere is inflated, despite the fact that there is actually FAR MORE land in the southern hemisphere.

It's amazing that map is still so widely used with these blatant inaccuracies.

EDIT
Mercator projection map
Peters projection map

You make a good point.  I've seen the distorted maps plenty of times in books, but I guess I didn't notice the distortion on the Wii.

I'm a Geography nut, so I tend to look for this sorta thing!