Breaking news not working

After I noticed that breaking news was only showing content from the uncategorised category, I changed my default category to another one. The result was that nothing was showing up.

I traced the problem to a function called ad_mag_lite_top_headline() which has a few curious things going on. For example, $arr_cat is set as an array with an item in it. After an if that will always return true, it is cast as an array into $cats just before an if where the test is $cats not empty.

To hack a fix I commented out the if and the if not empty code so that it ran as if the if had returned false. This gave me the most recent posts on my theme.

At a guess, I assume that I should be able to select the category for “breaking news” but I could not find any option that would allow me to do that.