Bob Simon's Pick: Mount Athos
"You have to understand, the words that we're saying in today's liturgy are the same words that Christ was saying," one Orthodox Christian monk told correspondent Bob Simon when he visited the monastic peninsula of Mount Athos in Greece. How better to make the point that very little has changed there in a long, long time.
Continue Reading »Bob Simon's wild kingdom
From wars to famines, from the Olympics to overthrown dictators, Bob Simon has covered just about every major international event in his 44-year career at CBS News. (He won a Lifetime Achievement Emmy eight years ago, and he's still going strong.)
Continue Reading »The Super Bowl: America's biggest bet
Legal sports gambling is all about playing the odds: checking the point spread in a game and deciding the team upon which to place your money. But, who sets those odds and how? It's a process of combining cold calculations with the occasional hunch.
Continue Reading »San Francisco on film: Days before the 1906 Quake
A blog post by David Browning, the producer of this week's "60 Minutes" story about a mysterious reel of film, known as "A Trip Down Market Street:"
My wife, I confess, comes up with some of the best stories I do. Last year she sent me a link from a friend to a Web site showing a badly scratched version of "A Trip Down Market Street," the remarkable movie made a century ago on San Francisco's main drag. It's a film guaranteed to mesmerize anybody who sees it, even with the scratches: a bygone time brought to life.
Continue Reading »Andy Rooney's Pick: "That's a dumb question"
Here at "60 Minutes Overtime" we had a great idea: each correspondent would choose a piece for a "Correspondent Favorites" summer series, and they all agreed to play along . . . until we contacted Andy Rooney. Andy bluntly told us that it was a dumb idea.
Fortunately, Andy's longtime, trusted colleagues Keith Kulin and Susan Bieber came to our rescue, and each picked a personal favorite.
Continue Reading »Homeless vets: Does anyone care?
A blog post from Henry Schuster, the producer behind this week's "60 Minutes" report about an annual event for homeless vets in San Diego called "Stand Down":
The costs of war aren't always obvious or immediate. A few months after I got back from a trip to Afghanistan, I got a call from one of the Marines with whom we were embedded. He couldn't sleep; he was drinking heavily; was afraid he was going to kill his dog and couldn't stop arguing with his girlfriend; he'd moved out on her and was living in the barracks. Already on what they call "a bag o'meds," a pharmaceutical cocktail prescribed by a Navy doctor, he was clearly suffering from PTSD - post-traumatic stress disorder. He didn't want to ask anyone at his base for help because he thought it would count against him. I urged him, pleaded with him, to get help.
Continue Reading »Byron Pitts' Pick: The SEED School
We continue our summer series of "Correspondent Favorites" with Byron Pitts' choice, "The SEED School," a story about the first urban public boarding school in the country.
Continue Reading »Reporting on an unsolved Mississippi murder
A special post from producer Sumi Aggarwal:
Like most American schoolchildren, I studied the civil rights movement. Years later, I only remembered the highlights: Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the bus boycotts and the images of police dogs and water cannons being used on demonstrators.
But in researching this story, I learned that the real ground battle was being fought by ordinary African-Americans in small towns all over the South. They tried to vote and stood up to local Klan leaders and many, like Louis Allen, paid for it with their lives.
Continue Reading »Kenan: The boy behind Global Medical Relief
On "60 Minutes" this week, Scott Pelley tells the story of Elissa Montanti and the global charity she runs out of a converted closet inside her tiny Staten Island home.
Montanti brings maimed children from war zones and disaster areas around the world to the United States for free medical treatment. She's helped over a hundred children so far, and it all started with a letter from a Bosnian boy named Kenan.
Continue Reading »Morley Safer's pick: Lenell Geter's in Jail
When we asked Morley Safer to choose a piece for our summer series of "Correspondent Favorites," he had a lot of options. After 41 years on "60 Minutes," Morley has a huge archive of stories.
Yet Morley didn't hesitate when he made his choice: a 1983 piece titled "Lenell Geter's in Jail." It was also a favorite of 60 Minutes' creator, Don Hewitt.
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