[Xplo]

The -1 penalty per day is brutal, and it makes the skill only suitable for cyberpunk data brokers buying and selling hot 0-day information, courtiers who have to know the absolute latest rumors and so on. In any setting without constant news updates or an extremely active rumor mill and a need to know what's in the news right now, this skill makes no sense as written.

Of course, you could throw the penalty out, or treat it more like Area Knowledge, with a -1 for every change in magnitude or location... so knowing news from a couple of months ago would be at -3 instead of -60, and 10-year-old news might be at -5 and at that point you're probably better off using Research instead unless you're ludicrously well-informed. And then the GM would just rule that you can't roll for information more recent than the last time you've checked your sources. This makes so much more sense to me.

I had a character who was kind of a genius at reading people, crowds, and social systems (including economics); she could plausibly reenact the bit from Watchmen where Ozymandias watches a hundred television channels at once and then makes stock picks based on the tenor and symbolism of the commercials. I'm pretty sure she had Current Affairs skills, but she never actually rolled against them (actually, that character never really realized her potential; I don't have good enough social skills of my own to play a social genius without help, and either the GM didn't get the concept or he wasn't really on board with it).