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After nearly a month of health problems that culminated with a stay in a New York City hospital for treatment of a blood clot in a vein between her brain and her skull, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was back in her office Monday morning.

The State Department released a photo of the 65-year-old, soon-to-be-retired Clinton chairing a weekly meeting of assistant secretaries.

Clinton should be able to make a long-planned departure from her post in coming weeks. President Obama has nominated Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to succeed Clinton and he's expected to be quickly confirmed by the Senate.

Update at 12:45 p.m. ET. A Helmet And A Jersey:

According to a spokeswoman, Clinton's staff gave her a warm welcome and two gifts — a football helmet with the department's seal and a football jersey with the number 112, for each of the countries she visited while secretary.

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Huell Howser, a fixture of public television in California, has died at 67. Howser hosted several public television programs, the most popular being California's Gold, which celebrated the state's unique stories and natural beauty.

Howser died Sunday night of natural causes, reports the Long Beach Press Telegram, citing a KCET representative who also says his death was "a complete surprise."

A native of Gallatin, Tenn., who moved to Los Angeles in 1981, Howser never discarded his Southern drawl — and he never lost his enthusiasm for finding the stories hidden in dimestores, historical sites, and state parks that many of his viewers found infectious.

Here's how Greg Braxton of The Los Angeles Times describes him:

"His upbeat boosterism accompanied an appearance that was simultaneously off-kilter and yet somehow cool with a hint of retro — a thick, square mane of white hair, sunglasses, shirts that showed off a drill sergeant's build and huge biceps, and expressions that ranged from pleasantness to jaw-dropping wonder with some of his discoveries. Often, he wore shorts."

As Braxton notes, Howser's perpetually buoyant spirit and folksy manner stretched beyond his public TV work; he inspired several caricatures of himself, including at least one that appeared on The Simpsons.

After a series of short segments called Videolog premiered in which Howser told the stories of everyday Californians, the idea matured into the longer-format California's Gold — and it endured for more than 19 years of production, according to his website.

One noteworthy early segment was titled "Elephant Man" — in which he told the story of an 80-year-old elephant trainer's reunion with Nita, an elephant that he had first acquired in 1955.

It's become an annual tradition: bidding up an outrageous price for a Pacific bluefin tuna during the first auction of the new year at Toyko's Tsukiji fish market.

And on Saturday, a bluefin tuna big enough to serve up about 10,000 pieces of sushi fetched a mind-boggling price: $1.76 million. That's about three times as much as last year's tuna and equates to about $3,600 per pound for the 489-pound fish.

The winning bidder, sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura, is likely well aware that the market value of this fish is much lower. According to a BBC report, Kimura said he wanted to "encourage Japan" with his purchase.

So, what's the problem? As my colleague Eliza Barclay reported last year, this extravagant sale — and the publicity around it — may be just one more way to push demand for this fish, at a time when the species is vulnerable due to overfishing.

An international scientific committee is expected to release its latest assessment of Pacific bluefin tuna stocks any day now. And environmentalists say they're concerned about the imperiled state of this fish population, given that there are few regulatory measures in place to effectively manage its stocks.

"The No. 1 thing that needs to happen is catch limits" to regulate the number and the size of fish caught, says Amanda Nickson of the Pew Environment Group. "That's the critical thing."

The standout of Tenth of December, though, is "The Semplica Girl Diaries," a story that's remarkable for its originality and unrelenting sadness. Written as a series of journal entries, it follows a middle-class striver who feels bad that he can't provide the rich, stylish lifestyle that his daughter craves. After winning the lottery, the narrator is able to buy the latest status symbol: a lawn installation of "Semplica girls," young immigrant women who are strung together by a surgical cable that runs through their heads. He's not sure why he needs it, he just knows that he does: "Lord, give us more. Give us enough. Help us not fall behind peers. Help us, that is, not fall further behind peers. For kids' sake. Do not want them scarred by how far behind we are."

It's possibly Saunders' strangest short story to date, but it's also one of his most realistic, and that's what makes it so horrifying. To anyone paying attention to contemporary American culture — with its objectification of women, obsession with consumerism and widespread desensitization to violence — the plot hits home.

It would be tempting to believe that Saunders' fiction portrays society the way a fun-house mirror does, reflecting images that look familiar but are, finally, exaggerated and unreal. Tenth of December suggests that's not the case — that what we assumed was a nightmare is, in fact, our new reality. It also proves that Saunders is one of America's best writers of fiction, and that his stories are as weird, scary and devastating as America itself.

Read an excerpt of Tenth of December