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Do you want to know about another threat coming out of eastern Asia that has not materialized yet? ABC's in-house physician Richard Besser was in Hong Kong to file his third report on the H7N9 avian strain of the influenza virus. Just as he told us on Monday and last Friday, the mutation that would allow human-to-human contagion has not occurred.
Damascus may look like an Open City but, in fact, it remains defended. CBS' Barry Petersen explains why he is safer if he does not don protective gear in Sniper Alley. It was just as dangerous for a baby in Vietnam 41 years ago. Steve Hartman, On The Road for CBS, tells us about the fate of Tran Thi Ngoc Bich, the precious pearl from Quang Tri, discovered trying to nurse at her dead mother's breast.
By the way, Hartman's profile was CBS' second subject this week to start life abandoned as a war orphan: Michelle Miller had already filed a Sierra Leone flashback on Wednesday.
The Food & Drug Administration snared publicity for its healthcare safety monitoring on two newscasts. CBS, as it has done frequently, followed up on the safety of compounding pharmacies, following the meningitis outbreak caused by tainted steroids shots from a compounder in New England. Compounding pharmacies are normally lightly regulated, by state authorities; Jim Axelrod reported that the FDA, in what may be a power grab, is now getting involved, with inspections of 31 facilities. On ABC, Ron Claiborne pointed to Intuitive Surgical, the manufacturer of robotic forceps. The firm is under scrutiny for 500 separate cases of surgery-gone-wrong. How many procedures do its machines perform each year? 450,000.
Look at Intuitive's peel-me-a-grape demonstration.
At the end of January, CBS' Chip Reid pointed the finger at the National Rifle Association for forcing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms bureaucracy to be so inefficient. Inspired by NRA lobbying, Congress has prohibited the BATF's National Tracing Center from using computers. Its archive for tracking guns relies on paper records and microfilm. Now ABC's Washington Watchdog David Kerley finds the same outrage -- and manages to persuade Sen Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, to sit down and defend it.
A $3.6bn punishment for 14 major banks for shady home foreclosure practices sounds significant. CBS' Wyatt Andrews explains why Sen Jack Reid, the Rhode Island Democrat, is not impressed.
If you want to see weather porn, check out Gabe Gutierrez' storm-chasing compilation in Tornado Alley from The Weather Channel's Mike Bettes on NBC.
Did you know that if you put too many postage stamps on a package, the Post Office will interpret that as a warning sign that there might be a bomb inside? ABC's Pierre Thomas knew. And he played a graphic artist's Virtual View computer-animated rendering to show what the outside and the inside of such a suspicious package might look like.
It was 18 months ago that ABC's Neal Karlinsky turned a yuck-it-up YouTube viral comedy hit into an entire nightly news report. It is now recycled as the intro to Chris Jansing's jaunt down the Road to Retirement on NBC. Jansing deluged her elderly demographic with free publicity for iPads, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, FaceTime. Call them Silver Surfers.
Lost amid the namedropping, cross-promotion, and publicity, I suppose there was some underlying point about the importance of immigration legislation. You look at the sitdown by NBC anchor Brian Williams with Laurene Powell and see if you can find it. Williams was promoting his primetime magazine show Rock Center. The hook was the premiere of The Dream Is Now, a documentary movie by David Guggenheim, whose previous social activism, Waiting for Superman, had reaped similar positive publicity, in that case on all three nightly newscasts. And Ms Powell: she happens to be the publicity-shy widow of Steven Jobs, which makes Williams treat her appearance as a so-called Get.
Last week, ABC went sports mad for college hoops. Now it has caught baseball fever. Person of the Week was Rachel Robinson, the widow of Brooklyn Dodger Jackie, as David Wright offered free publicity to 42, her late husband's biopic movie, premiering in theaters this weekend. And Paula Faris found a bench-clearing brawl, in which another Dodger, pitcher Zack Grienke, broke his collarbone, to be newsworthy enough to warrant this asinine observation: "America's pastime could be past the point of being called a gentleman's game."
RIP Jonathan Winters: Golden Age of Television clips were compiled by Kevin Tibbles of NBC (name-dropping NBC News' Tom Brokaw) and Bill Whitaker of CBS (name-dropping CBS News' Ed Murrow).
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