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The intrepid Clarissa Ward, highlighting the plight of Syrian refugees for CBS, by coincidence, made Terry Moran's otherwise-fascinating closing feature for ABC look weak by comparison. Ward traveled to the so-called Dead Cities of Syria: abandoned classical Roman ruins where villagers shelter from bombardment in underground caves. Her daring underscored the lack of its in a similar story from the studio-bound Moran: how 38 Ukrainian Jews escaped the Nazi Holocaust in 1943 by hiding underground in caves for 500 days. While Ward was on the scene, Moran narrated second-hand footage from No Place on Earth, a documentary movie made by Janet Tobias, a one-time ABC News staffer.
NBC's Tom Costello consulted with Bob Sullivan, his network's technology correspondent, on an Investigation into the cyber-attacks on Websites run by major American banks. In total, since last fall, 15 banks have lost 249 hours of online service. Costello named Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America as prime targets. The hackers call themselves al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, protesting Hollywood video-blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed. Costello thinks QCF is a front for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
CBS kicked off its newscast with Anna Werner in Texas, following up on the murder of District Attorney Mike McClelland of Kaufman County. She scooped in-store security video from O'Neill Kidwell's gun shop in Forney from the day before the DA died. McClelland was shopping for revolvers and bulletproof vests to protect his office from possible assassination.
In honor of Martin Luther King, assassinated while campaigning for striking sanitation workers 45 years ago, NBC's Ann Curry traveled to Memphis to sit down with Cleo Smith and Alvin Turner. "I had been treated like a boy for so long…" was Turner's explanation for the I Am A Man sandwich board he wore.
It was a banner day for New England on CBS…
Allen Pizzey showed us the family of Dominic Gondreau, the eight-year-old boy from Rhode Island who hugged a Pope.
From Vermont, in-house physician Jon LaPook filed one of those anecdotal vignettes that his network specializes in. Meet Barbara Geake, aged 81, a quintessential flinty Yankee: "Frustratin' as the divvil!"
Anchor Scott Pelley goes back to Connecticut one more time (he was there last Wednesday and this Wednesday too) to preview his 60 Minutes profile in grief. This is now just mawkish. It is as if the bereaved had made a pact with Pelley: You give us publicity for our gun control politics; in return we shall allow you to make us bawl like babies. Hear the sniveling start when he asks this shameless question of Nicole, the mother of the dead six-year-old Dylan Hopley: "How do you stay in touch with the child that you lost?"
ABC still has March Madness on its mind: Wednesday its newscast both led and closed with college basketball, Rutgers and Louisville. Now Matt Gutman turns to Baylor, and its female star Brittney Griner. He went to ABC's sibling network ESPN for a tale-of-the-tape comparison with LeBron James. Griner gives James nothing in height or reach, but 40lbs of muscle in bulk.
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