Congress has been working on some important legislation recently that will benefit the country's service-disabled veterans.

The 2014 Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act (S. 2258) now heads to President Obama for his signature, after the House passed the bill on Tuesday. The legislation increases the COLA for vets' disability benefits starting Dec. 1, 2014. The rate of the increase will be the same as the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients. The annual COLA legislation, which the Senate approved last week, also affects the disability payments and compensation for vets' surviving spouses and children.

And on Wednesday afternoon, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved bipartisan legislation that would give disabled vets hired as federal employees access to their full year's sick leave immediately upon starting their jobs.

The Federal Reserve Wednesday reassured investors that it will hold interest rates near zero for a "considerable time" after it ends the bond-buying program known as quantitative easing in October. In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) closed at a new record high.

Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget and author of the book, The Great Deformation, David Stockman, has significant concerns about that very policy.

"I'm worried... that we've got the greatest bubble created by a central bank in human history," he told Yahoo Finance.

In a recent blog post, Stockman offered a handful of high-flying stocks as evidence of what he sees as "madness."

"...Twitter, is all that is required to remind us that once again markets are trading in the nosebleed section of history, rivaling even the madness of March 2000."

Behind the madness

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Stockman blamed Fed policy for creating that madness.

"We have been shoving zero-cost money into the financial markets for 6-years running," he said. "That's the kerosene that drives speculative trading - the carry trades. That's what the gamblers use to fund their position as they move from one momentum play and trade to another."

And that, he says, is not sustainable. While Stockman believes tech stocks are especially overvalued, he warns that it's not just tech valuations that are inflated. "Everything's massively overvalued, and it's predicated on zero-cost overnight money that continues these carry trades; It can't continue."

And he still believes, as he has for some time - so far, incorrectly - that there will be a day of reckoning.

"When the trades begin to unwind because the carry cost has to normalize, you're going to have a dramatic re-pricing dislocation in these financial markets."

As Yahoo Finance's Lauren Lyster points out in the associated video, investors who heeded Stockman's advice last year would have missed out on a 28% run-up in stocks. But Stockman remains steadfast in his belief that the current Fed policy and the resultant market behavior can not continue. "I think what the Fed is doing is so unprecedented, what is happening in the markets is so unnatural," he said. "This is dangerous, combustible stuff, and I don't know when the explosion occurs - when the collapse suddenly is upon us - but when it happens, people will be happy that they got out of the way if they did."

The Veterans Affairs Department wants to increase the annual salaries of new physicians and dentists by up to $35,000 as part of a nationwide recruitment effort to hire more doctors and improve veterans' access to care.

The change, which the department announced Wednesday, would update existing pay tables for several categories of physicians in the Veterans Health Administration, enabling newly hired doctors to potentially earn between $20,000 and $35,000 more than the current salary ranges. The pay ranges for physicians who serve in leadership roles, including department undersecretaries and VA medical center directors, would not change. The notice outlining the new policy will be published Thursday in the Federal Register and will take effect on Nov. 30.

"We are committed to hiring more medical professionals across the country to better serve veterans and expand their access to timely, high-quality care," said VA Secretary Bob McDonald, in a statement.

The bison population in Yellowstone National Park will be significantly reduced this winter, as park officials have announced a plan to cull up to 900 animals that attempt to leave or drift away from the park.

The park's famous bison population currently stands at roughly 4,900, meaning it could be reduced by about one-fifth.

According to Reuters, the cull announced Tuesday by Yellowstone's science and research branch would be the largest in seven years.

However, it would still leave the herd's numbers significantly higher than what both state and federal wildlife officials have established as the target goal - a population of somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500.

"It will not get us close to the goal of 3,000, but it will stabilize the population and bring it down somewhat," David Hallac, chief of the park's science and research branch, told Reuters.

Although Yellowstone's bison compose the only remaining herd of free-ranging buffalo in the United States, officials want to keep the population from growing too large, out of fear that drifting animals will spread a bacterial disease known as brucellosis to cattle that also graze in Montana's fields.

It has been widely reported that Michelle Obama's fight against childhood obesity in America's schools has reached past the lunchroom into bake sales and even the vending machines.

The First Lady's new standards remove any sugary snacks over 200 calories from the machines. Sometimes machines are emptied all together leaving students upset and hungry.

The Census Bureau reported Thursday that the nation's marriage rate is the lowest since 1920, and the first-time inclusion of same sex married couples did little to reverse the decline.

According to Pew Research Center analysis, the marriage rate of Americans 18 and older hit a bottom of 50.3 percent in 2013, down from 50.5 percent in 2012. In 1920, the first year mentioned, 65 percent were married, and the marriage rate hit a high of 72.2 percent in 1960.

Ian Glomski thought he was going to make a difference in the fight to protect people from deadly anthrax germs. He had done everything right - attended one top university, landed an assistant professorship at another.

But Glomski ran head-on into an unpleasant reality: These days, the scramble for money to conduct research has become stultifying.

So, he's giving up on science.

And he's not alone. Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade. There are far more scientists competing for grants than there is money to support them.

That crunch is forcing some people out of science altogether, either because they can't get research funding at all or, in Glomski's case, because the rat race has simply become too unpleasant.

"My lab was well-funded until, basically, the moment I decided I wasn't going to work there anymore," he says during an interview on the porch swing of his home in Charlottesville, Va. "And I probably could have scraped through there for the rest of my career, as I had been doing, but I would have had regrets."

Glomski's problem was that he could only get funding to do very predictable, unexciting research. When money gets tight, often only the most risk-averse ideas get funded, he and others say.

Two acts of ugly terrorism occurred in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963.

One act was widely abhorred. The other act ignored.

Many across America know about the 9/15/63 Birmingham murders of four little girls slain in the bombing of a black Baptist church 18-days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his stirring "I Have A Dream" speech.

However, few know about the Birmingham murder of Johnny Robinson, a 16-year-old shot in the back by a policeman hours after that church bombing.

If the deaths of those four children inside that Birmingham church catalyzed the 1960s-era Civil Rights Movement contributing to the racial progress America now praises itself for achieving, the death of Johnny Robinson represents yet another instance of the regression across America on the issue of effectively addressing lawlessness by law enforcers - lawlessness that most often evades legal accountability.

Historically, America has a history of downplaying brutal behavior by police.

Police abuses - from fatal shootings through false arrests to the gratuitous use of foul or threatening language - are dismissed as isolated acts of a 'few bad apples' instead of as an endemic scourge historically impacting minorities and increasing impacting non-minorities. Top policy-makers and even much of the public embrace this dismissal dynamic.

Both in raw numbers and by percentage of the population, the United States has the most prisoners of any developed country in the world - and it has the largest total prison population of any nation. That didn't change in 2013. After several years in which the prison population dropped slightly, the raw number of inmates in United States custody went up again in 2013.

More than 1.57 million inmates sat behind bars in federal, state, and county prisons and jails around the country as of December 31, 2013. In the federal prisons, more than half of those sentenced to a stints of a year or longer are still there for drug crimes. In states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, and Georgia, at least 1 percent of male residents were in prison on December 31. And across the country, racial disparities persist. Black men are six times more likely than white men to be in prison. Hispanic men are 2.4 times more likely, according to a Sentencing Project analysis of the data.

This doesn't pain the full picture of the U.S. incarceration system. Many have estimated the total number of U.S. incarceration to be more than 2.4 million. This is in part because another estimated 12 million individuals cycle through the county jail systems in a given year for periods of less than a year, and are therefore not factored into a snapshot on December 31. There are also other mechanisms of incarceration not factored into this figure, including immigration detention, civil commitment, and Indian Country facilities, according to a Prison Policy Initiative briefing.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that household income for noncitizens working in the United States rose 6.0 percent between 2012 and 2013, 15 times more than the paltry 0.4 percent increase for households led by native-born U.S. workers.

Census said income households led by foreign-born workers, which includes noncitizens and naturalized citizens, rose 1.7 percent over the same period of time. That's still about four times higher than the 0.4 percent increase for native born workers.

Republicans have argued for months that the effort by Democrats to ease immigration rules would make it easier for noncitizens to find jobs, at the expense of U.S. citizens. The Census report seems to indicate that may already be happening, as it shows native U.S. household income was almost flat between 2012 and 2013, while income for foreign born residents rose much more.

Census stressed that its estimates were just that - estimates. But its 90 percent confidence intervals still indicate a wide difference between income for citizen and non-citizen income - it also indicates that the income of some households led by native U.S. workers actually declined between 2012 and 2013.

Census released its report on the same day that the Congressional Research Service released a memo that said enacting the Senate's comprehensive immigration legislation would increase the population of foreign-born U.S. residents by 10 million above normal growth rates over the next eight years.