All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Every year I vow to improve myself in some way, shape or form, and every year I fail spectacularly. I never ran that marathon. I never learned to speak Russian, or Arabic, or Icelandic. I never sponsored an endangered animal or a politician, and I have yet to ride a unicycle.

It is a mathematical certainty that if I vow to do something, it is not going to happen. In fact, usually the complete opposite occurs. So in that defeatist and antithetical spirit, I resolve to do the following things in 2009:

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Every year I vow to improve myself in some way, shape or form, and every year I fail spectacularly. I never ran that marathon. I never learned to speak Russian, or Arabic, or Icelandic. I never sponsored an endangered animal or a politician, and I have yet to ride a unicycle.

It is a mathematical certainty that if I vow to do something, it is not going to happen. In fact, usually the complete opposite occurs. So in that defeatist and antithetical spirit, I resolve to do the following things in 2009:

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Christina Ruffini is a CBS News broadcast associate based in Washington.In the aftermath of the holidays, I have been left with more than a few things that I would like to give back.

First there was the collection of bargain impostor perfumes I received from my anosmatic aunt, which exploded in the mail and arrived at my door smelling like a French brothel.

Then, there was the half-empty bottle of liqueur I got from a friend who simply shrugged and said, "Sorry, I had unexpected company."

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Christina Ruffini is a CBS News broadcast associate based in Washington.
In the aftermath of the holidays, I have been left with more than a few things that I would like to give back.

First there was the collection of bargain impostor perfumes I received from my anosmatic aunt, which exploded in the mail and arrived at my door smelling like a French brothel.

Then, there was the half-empty bottle of liqueur I got from a friend who simply shrugged and said, "Sorry, I had unexpected company."

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Tucker Reals is CBSNews.com's London producer. He has been in the United Kingdom since December 2005, when he moved from the Washington, D.C., area. He now faces his biggest challenge.

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Yesterday, I met Bean for the first time. Bean is the 12-week-old fetus turning summersaults in my wife's belly.

It all happened so fast. I only moved to England three years ago, and now I'm doing my part to populate this already-cramped island.

Our pregnancy (I will take the literary license frequently assumed by men and call it "ours," despite my actual, physical role in the act having long passed), was entirely planned and desired. But it still managed to surprise me when Bean popped up on a computer monitor in the darkened hospital scan room.

Bean waved at me, as if to say, "I'm really here, tough guy. Get used to it."

All the emotions which were fertilized in my mind about a year ago, when we started seriously discussing procreation, came unexpectedly and instantaneously to full term. Fear, joy, anxiety, helplessness and yes, even slight panic all hit me, all at once. None of them wiped the smile off my face, but the shock was real.

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(CBS)

Dan Raviv is a National Correspondent for CBS News Radio and co-author of Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community.

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I’ve been covering Israel’s espionage agencies for almost 20 years, and suddenly this morning there was a blast from the past – an arrest in what FBI personnel for years had called “the hunt for Agent X.” American investigators refused to believe Israel’s official contention that the Jonathan Pollard affair – running an agent with U.S. Naval Intelligence, who delivered thousands of secret documents to the Israelis – was an isolated incident.

The long memory and long arm of the law finally grabbed Ben-Ami Kadish, whose alleged crimes apparently took place before Pollard was arrested in November 1985. According to prosecutors, Kadish and Pollard were tasked by the same “handler” – a science attaché at Israel’s Consulate-General in New York. That man vanished from the U.S. within hours of Pollard’s arrest. Pollard eventually was sentenced to life in prison.

The diplomat’s boss was Rafi Eitan, a legendary intelligence agent who took part in Israel’s capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. Eitan, a man who pushes the envelope in many ways, is now an Israeli cabinet minister.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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This long weekend I devoured Rick Atkinson’s latest brilliant offering, “The Day of Battle,” a profound and gut-wrenching account of the war in Sicily and Italy in 1943 and 1944. Atikinson won a Pulitzer Price for his work, “An Army of Dawn,” the first part of his “Liberation Trilogy” about the Allied effort in Europe in World War II. “The Day of Battle” is part two in the series and just as good as its predecessor.

Reading Atkinson’s work during the Veterans’ Day commemoration is fitting, of course. But none of us have to go back 64 years to read about or see the devastation war brings to people here, there, and everywhere. And what was most striking to me about Atkinson’s work were the similarities between the military and governmental war effort he described and the one in which we now are engaged in Iraq. As Richard Burton put it, in the classic World War II movie The Longest Day, “I suppose it’s always like that, in war…”

So, as I’m reading about how the Allies miscalculated (or simply didn’t pay enough attention) to the need to rebuild the Italian infrastructure in liberated territory, the side burner of my brain is heating up with thoughts about how many of those same mistakes were made in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Atkinson writes about how time pressures sabotaged effective post-occupation plans (what with Stalin and all pressing for a second front in Western Europe). But even when we have plenty of time to plan a war--- Iraq being a “war of our choosing” remember—we can’t seem to get the post-fighting part right...

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