Very Strange Category issue

I am having a strange issue come up with my categories. I have a category (“news”) that has 750 or so posts in it. I don’t really display all of the posts on my site in one place, I use category archives to display what I want, where I want. As a consequence, I use a widget called category posts that displays the last few posts in a given category. I noticed my “news category wasn’t showing up as an option (the widget doesn’t display categories that have no posts). I looked at my categories and my news category lists no posts. The posts are there, but when I check a list of my categories it shows 0 posts.

Has anyone ever seen this?

I guess it doesn’t hurt anything except I am going to have to rewrite the widget to hard code the category in it.