The Google Groups thread has a response specifically about both issues, where JohnMu of Google said:

It looks like this issue should be resolved now. It might take some time for things to catch up across the board, so you might still need to be a bit patient :).

John added a personal note about the first issue:

Sunil, I noticed that we just picked up a blog post from yesterday (I don't know which timezone you're in :-)) from your site, I think that's a good sign! Remember that it will generally take some time for the charts in Webmaster Tools to catch up as well but from what I can see it looks pretty much on-target.

So it appears that what we thought the issue was, might have not been on the webmaster side. It seems like Google fixed the issues on their side and now everyone should be happy going forward, at least for the time being.