Following up on this one:
Merging the news commentary isn't possible, because there is news that is posted to the UK site that never appears on the US site, and vice versa, including contests and giveaways that apply only to Europe or America. What was done, though, is we've provided access to the news and article commentary areas with pretty easy access from the forum home page itself. Previously, you'd have to manually navigate to either commentary section. With the new functionality, you can, as you mention, scroll to the bottom and find these as subforum categories and browse them.