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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM AUGUST 14, 2007
The safety of children's toys led all three newscasts as Mattel announced a recall of 9.5m items, all of which were manufactured in the People's Republic of China. Most of the problems were in Polly Pocket play sets. Their magnets are loose and, if swallowed, magnetic attraction can lacerate a toddler's digestive tract. Meanwhile Sarge from the movie Cars has been painted with toxic lead paint.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR AUGUST 14, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
MATTEL PULLS KILLER MAGNETS The safety of children's toys led all three newscasts as Mattel announced a recall of 9.5m items, all of which were manufactured in the People's Republic of China. Most of the problems were in Polly Pocket play sets. Their magnets are loose and, if swallowed, magnetic attraction can lacerate a toddler's digestive tract. Meanwhile Sarge from the movie Cars has been painted with toxic lead paint.
"Parents began a mad scramble sorting through the toy box," said a sympathetic NBC's Kerry Sanders as the long list of recalled items was released. Some of the recalls, CBS' Nancy Cordes pointed out, were made as long ago as 2002, so are "no longer on store shelves" but in "daycares and schools and homes--places that do not always get word of the dangers." ABC's David Kerley consulted with Chrissy Cianflone of Safe Kids Worldwide. She recommended that parents buy only age-appropriate toys, nothing too small; that they store each child's toys separately; and sign up for e-mail alerts from the safety recall Website. At NBC, anchor Brian Williams checked with in-house physician Nancy Snyderman (at the tail of the Sanders videostream) about the dangers of lead poisoning. "Good diets," was her advice. "Children who do not get enough calcium and iron absorb lead more readily."
"Made in China is quickly becoming synonymous with Buyer Beware," commented ABC's Betsy Stark (subscription required). "Safety problems may be the price Americans pay for low-cost goods from China--Chinese factories skimping on safety." For example, Stark quoted David Barboza, the Shanghai based correspondent of The New York Times on how manufacturing plants fool safety inspectors: "There is another factory nearby that is actually doing most of the production and this factory that they are visiting is the front factory." A pair of reports from Beijing by CBS and NBC took differing views of the government. There are 10,000 toymaking factories in China, NBC's Ian Williams told us, accounting for four out of every five toys produced worldwide. Williams quoted Li Yuan Peng, a state export official, as attaching "high importance" to safety problems. However, "although Beijing has beefed up its rules, they are not always implemented locally." CBS' Barry Petersen was not convinced that safety comes first: "China's leaders are focused on keeping the economic miracle powering on. Cracking down on factories that make exports means threatening sales and profits."
TRAFFIC JAMS ABC's Lisa Stark (subscription required) reported on the $850m granted by the federal Department of Transportation to Miami, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Francisco and New York to conduct experiments in reducing rush hour traffic congestion. San Francisco, for example, plans to deploy high speed buses that automatically change traffic lights to green in their favor as they approach. Highways will be converted to "variable toll lanes," where the price for usage rises in proportion to its level of congestion. On CBS, Seth Doane got behind the wheel of his silver convertible to illustrate the congestion in New York City: GoogleMaps told him that an eleven-mile drive to The Bronx should take 24 minutes. "This was a good day," rejoiced Doane--45 minutes. He headed for the borough to attend Mayor Michael Bloomberg's press conference on his congestion relief scheme: $8 per car to enter Manhattan during daylight on a weekday. It is modeled on tolls imposed in Singapore and London but "still has to pass the state legislature."
REGION TO REGION Turning from highways to airways, NBC had Tom Costello look In Depth at the causes of the record level of airline flight delays that were announced last week (text link). Costello fingered a pair of culprits. First, domestic airlines have changed the composition of their fleets over the past six years--eliminating almost 400 large jetliners, adding more than 1,000 small regional jets. The benefit of frequent shorthaul service comes at the price of a congested schedule of daily takeoffs and landings, and consequent delays, at major airport hubs. Second, the FAA wants $20bn to upgrade it air traffic control to a satellite system, "but so far Congress has not acted."
GOOD VIBRATIONS Last Thursday, CBS sent Sheila MacVicar to Switzerland to show us how the Europeans use fiber optics to monitor whether their bridges are falling down. Now NBC has George Lewis visit Bridge Doctor Maria Fang, an engineering professor with a fear of heights at UCal-Irvine, to show us What Works. "Using C21st technology to keep an eye on the nation's aging infrastructure," Fang has equipped bridges on the earthquake prone Pacific coast with vibration sensors: "Any unusual patterns can trigger an alarm."
LEAD POISONING It must be the obvious irony of the place name that makes the local crime wave in the City of Brotherly Love such a national story. Already in 2007, the city has suffered more than 250 murders. CBS had Byron Pitts file a two-parter from Battleline Philadelphia last month. Now ABC has assigned Pierre Thomas to north Philadelphia's Temple University Hospital emergency room for the second part of his Mean Streets. The ER runs a program dubbed The Cradle to the Grave to dramatize to neighborhood teenagers just how bad bullets are for one's health. It includes the reenactment of the case of Lamont Adams, a 16-year-old who died alone, without friends or family, after just 15 minutes of treatment in the trauma unit, shot 24 times over a $100 dice game. "The last step for these young people is the morgue. They left shell-shocked."
ICE AND FIRE For part two of his series Journey to the Top of the World on the shrinking of the ice cap in the Arctic Ocean, CBS' Daniel Sieberg explained that it is not just warmer water that is changing the marine ecosystem. The melting ice is making the ocean less salty, too. "Saltwater ecosystems are more fragile than their freshwater counterparts" which means that phytoplankton may not survive. Missing phytoplankton poses a twofold problem: it is at the bottom of the food chain so its absence hurts zooplankton, which hurts fish, which hurts sea birds and so on; second phytoplankton absorbs carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen--fewer phyloplankta, less air for humans to breathe
While Sieberg was enjoying the cold of Nunavut, his colleague Mark Strassmann was assigned to cover the heatwave across the southeast--including footage of a playground on fire in Arlington Tex. "Officials suspect spontaneous combustion. The heat actually ignited rotted wood chips!"
BLIND DATES It is not clear whether ABC's David Muir (subscription required) was presenting an expose into a company called Intelius or drumming up business on its behalf. Intelius has compiled a telephone directory, complete with names, numbers and addresses, for cell phones. It claims to have 90m records already in its database with a further 70m to be collected within days. At a charge of $15 a name, one can buy a person's number and address. Muir mentioned some of Intelius' justifications. It can, for example, "help someone who is doing research before a blind date."
On a more friendly note, Muir's colleague John Berman brought us SweetOnGeeks.com, an online service that "may be an answer for all the Star Trek loving, lightsaber wielding, videogame playing--yet loveseeking people out there." The dating service runs ads for cloakmakers and paranormal investigators and so far has 4,000 self-confessed nerds signed up for a hook up.
MENTIONED IN PASSING The network newscasts do not assign correspondents to all of the news of the day. If Tyndall Report readers come across videostreamed reports online of stories that were mentioned only in passing, post the link in comments for us to check out.
Today's examples: Gen George Casey, the Chief of Staff of the USArmy, warned that the deployment of his troops abroad is unsustainable…on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had another down day, off 207 points to 13028…Baseball Yankee Phil Rizzuto died, aged 89, a Hall of Fame shortstop turned broadcaster…fired morning radio drivetime host Don Imus settled his lawsuit against CBS.
"Parents began a mad scramble sorting through the toy box," said a sympathetic NBC's Kerry Sanders as the long list of recalled items was released. Some of the recalls, CBS' Nancy Cordes pointed out, were made as long ago as 2002, so are "no longer on store shelves" but in "daycares and schools and homes--places that do not always get word of the dangers." ABC's David Kerley consulted with Chrissy Cianflone of Safe Kids Worldwide. She recommended that parents buy only age-appropriate toys, nothing too small; that they store each child's toys separately; and sign up for e-mail alerts from the safety recall Website. At NBC, anchor Brian Williams checked with in-house physician Nancy Snyderman (at the tail of the Sanders videostream) about the dangers of lead poisoning. "Good diets," was her advice. "Children who do not get enough calcium and iron absorb lead more readily."
"Made in China is quickly becoming synonymous with Buyer Beware," commented ABC's Betsy Stark (subscription required). "Safety problems may be the price Americans pay for low-cost goods from China--Chinese factories skimping on safety." For example, Stark quoted David Barboza, the Shanghai based correspondent of The New York Times on how manufacturing plants fool safety inspectors: "There is another factory nearby that is actually doing most of the production and this factory that they are visiting is the front factory." A pair of reports from Beijing by CBS and NBC took differing views of the government. There are 10,000 toymaking factories in China, NBC's Ian Williams told us, accounting for four out of every five toys produced worldwide. Williams quoted Li Yuan Peng, a state export official, as attaching "high importance" to safety problems. However, "although Beijing has beefed up its rules, they are not always implemented locally." CBS' Barry Petersen was not convinced that safety comes first: "China's leaders are focused on keeping the economic miracle powering on. Cracking down on factories that make exports means threatening sales and profits."
TRAFFIC JAMS ABC's Lisa Stark (subscription required) reported on the $850m granted by the federal Department of Transportation to Miami, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Francisco and New York to conduct experiments in reducing rush hour traffic congestion. San Francisco, for example, plans to deploy high speed buses that automatically change traffic lights to green in their favor as they approach. Highways will be converted to "variable toll lanes," where the price for usage rises in proportion to its level of congestion. On CBS, Seth Doane got behind the wheel of his silver convertible to illustrate the congestion in New York City: GoogleMaps told him that an eleven-mile drive to The Bronx should take 24 minutes. "This was a good day," rejoiced Doane--45 minutes. He headed for the borough to attend Mayor Michael Bloomberg's press conference on his congestion relief scheme: $8 per car to enter Manhattan during daylight on a weekday. It is modeled on tolls imposed in Singapore and London but "still has to pass the state legislature."
REGION TO REGION Turning from highways to airways, NBC had Tom Costello look In Depth at the causes of the record level of airline flight delays that were announced last week (text link). Costello fingered a pair of culprits. First, domestic airlines have changed the composition of their fleets over the past six years--eliminating almost 400 large jetliners, adding more than 1,000 small regional jets. The benefit of frequent shorthaul service comes at the price of a congested schedule of daily takeoffs and landings, and consequent delays, at major airport hubs. Second, the FAA wants $20bn to upgrade it air traffic control to a satellite system, "but so far Congress has not acted."
GOOD VIBRATIONS Last Thursday, CBS sent Sheila MacVicar to Switzerland to show us how the Europeans use fiber optics to monitor whether their bridges are falling down. Now NBC has George Lewis visit Bridge Doctor Maria Fang, an engineering professor with a fear of heights at UCal-Irvine, to show us What Works. "Using C21st technology to keep an eye on the nation's aging infrastructure," Fang has equipped bridges on the earthquake prone Pacific coast with vibration sensors: "Any unusual patterns can trigger an alarm."
LEAD POISONING It must be the obvious irony of the place name that makes the local crime wave in the City of Brotherly Love such a national story. Already in 2007, the city has suffered more than 250 murders. CBS had Byron Pitts file a two-parter from Battleline Philadelphia last month. Now ABC has assigned Pierre Thomas to north Philadelphia's Temple University Hospital emergency room for the second part of his Mean Streets. The ER runs a program dubbed The Cradle to the Grave to dramatize to neighborhood teenagers just how bad bullets are for one's health. It includes the reenactment of the case of Lamont Adams, a 16-year-old who died alone, without friends or family, after just 15 minutes of treatment in the trauma unit, shot 24 times over a $100 dice game. "The last step for these young people is the morgue. They left shell-shocked."
ICE AND FIRE For part two of his series Journey to the Top of the World on the shrinking of the ice cap in the Arctic Ocean, CBS' Daniel Sieberg explained that it is not just warmer water that is changing the marine ecosystem. The melting ice is making the ocean less salty, too. "Saltwater ecosystems are more fragile than their freshwater counterparts" which means that phytoplankton may not survive. Missing phytoplankton poses a twofold problem: it is at the bottom of the food chain so its absence hurts zooplankton, which hurts fish, which hurts sea birds and so on; second phytoplankton absorbs carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen--fewer phyloplankta, less air for humans to breathe
While Sieberg was enjoying the cold of Nunavut, his colleague Mark Strassmann was assigned to cover the heatwave across the southeast--including footage of a playground on fire in Arlington Tex. "Officials suspect spontaneous combustion. The heat actually ignited rotted wood chips!"
BLIND DATES It is not clear whether ABC's David Muir (subscription required) was presenting an expose into a company called Intelius or drumming up business on its behalf. Intelius has compiled a telephone directory, complete with names, numbers and addresses, for cell phones. It claims to have 90m records already in its database with a further 70m to be collected within days. At a charge of $15 a name, one can buy a person's number and address. Muir mentioned some of Intelius' justifications. It can, for example, "help someone who is doing research before a blind date."
On a more friendly note, Muir's colleague John Berman brought us SweetOnGeeks.com, an online service that "may be an answer for all the Star Trek loving, lightsaber wielding, videogame playing--yet loveseeking people out there." The dating service runs ads for cloakmakers and paranormal investigators and so far has 4,000 self-confessed nerds signed up for a hook up.
MENTIONED IN PASSING The network newscasts do not assign correspondents to all of the news of the day. If Tyndall Report readers come across videostreamed reports online of stories that were mentioned only in passing, post the link in comments for us to check out.
Today's examples: Gen George Casey, the Chief of Staff of the USArmy, warned that the deployment of his troops abroad is unsustainable…on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had another down day, off 207 points to 13028…Baseball Yankee Phil Rizzuto died, aged 89, a Hall of Fame shortstop turned broadcaster…fired morning radio drivetime host Don Imus settled his lawsuit against CBS.
