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President Barack Obama headed to Mexico City for talks with President Enrique Pena Nieto. None of the networks treated the content of their diplomacy as newsworthy enough to warrant direct coverage by their White House correspondents. Each of them did use the meeting as a news hook for a Mexico-related feature, though. ABC sent Jim Avila to the northern village of El Cargadero, where decades of California-bound depopulation is starting to reverse itself. CBS sent Bill Whitaker to the barrios of Ciudad Juraez, where decades of narcotics violence has torn families apart. NBC installed heat-sensing night-vision cameras in the ranchlands of rural Arizona, to document undocumented border crossings by marijuana smugglers and visaless immigrants.
Mark Potter narrated NBC's hidden camera footage, and came up with the same conclusion as CBS' Anna Werner on Wednesday, and ABC's Jim Avila last month: if you want to cross the border from Mexico unchecked and unmolested, stay away from cities and choose arid, unpopulated, ranchlands.
ABC turned to CCTV surveillance camera footage instead. Last fall ABC's Pierre Thomas warned us that our cellphones are a prime target for street theft. Now Linsey Davis repeats the warning, along with a request to manufacturers and carriers. If they installed a so-called kill switch that deactivates a phone once it is stolen, the phones would lose their resale value and no longer be such an inviting target for thieves.
Sen Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) is under fire from the folks back home about her vote not to extend background checks on would-be purchasers of firearms. Wednesday, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell speculated about whether any backlash would match that of the Tea Party against healthcare reform in 2010. Now Chip Reid travels to New Hampshire to take the temperature of the opposition.
Mental healthcare came under scrutiny on ABC and CBS. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook worried about the babyboom generation, the cohort whose suicide rate is rising fastest. Suicides now account for 38K deaths annually nationwide. On ABC, Cecilia Vega gave a tip of the hat to the Sacramento Bee for its expose of patient dumping by psychiatric hospitals. Vega pointed the finger at Nevada's state mental health facility in Las Vegas, which has put psychotic patients on a Greyhound bus and sent them out of state without a social services safety net.
NBC turned to the public health issue of allergies. A survey by the Centers for Disease Control has found enormous increases in the past 15 years, especially among children, especially triggered by food. But eczema and asthma are on the uptrend too, Anne Thompson warned.
Artist of the Day is Florentijn Hofman, sculptor. ABC's DC-based John Donvan narrated footage of his floating bathtub-inspired installation in Hong Kong Harbor.
Look at Miguel Almaguer on his Tiger Cruise on the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis and tell me in what way this was not an infomercial for the USNavy. NBC should send an invoice to the Pentagon for publicity and promotion.
CBS' Michelle Miller repeated the movement's spin from 50 years ago when she walked us through an exhibit at the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. Activists named the protest -- which pitted water cannons and police dogs against non-violent marchers -- the Children's March. That title was designed to make the crackdown by Jim Crow authorities seem all the more vicious. In fact, Miller told us, the marchers were not children but teenagers, aged 12 to 18.
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