All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Katie’s on assignment.

President Teddy Roosevelt had a motto: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

As USA Today reports, some senior citizens are taking that advice to heart.

More than 3,500 of them across the country are studying Cane Fu. They're learning to use their canes as weapons for self defense through an association called Cane Masters International.

We've all seen those terrifying stories on the news - an elderly man or woman hit or pushed by a cowardly robber. Well, seniors are disproportionately the targets of thieves, and about 90 percent of attacks against them involve property crime.

Hopefully the people studying Cane Fu won't ever have to use it, and will practice proper techniques so they don't get injured.

But for that extra bit of confidence it may bring, there's nothing wrong with learning how to protect yourself.

That cane could give you a greater handle - on your safety.

I'm Michelle Miller, CBS News.

The plan just didn't fly. So, the government is abandoning efforts to keep the public from seeing statistics on bird strikes, like the one that forced Captain Sully to make that dramatic splashdown in the Hudson River.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says if the White House can release memos about interrogating terror suspects, it's hard to justify sealing records about birds.

These collisions are a real concern. They've more than quadrupled since 1990 to more than 1,700 a year. But federal officials were afraid that if passengers knew which airports had the most bird strikes, they might avoid flying there, and that airports might stop reporting incidents.

The solution is not secrecy - it is to make sure these accidents are reported and to implement systems that can warn pilots when flocks are nearby. Keeping passengers in the dark about safety risks is for the birds.

Michelle Miller is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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Imagine dealing with terminal cancer.

Those facing that dilemma often decide to give up hope.

But there is hope out there, as researchers delve deeper mother nature's pharmacy.

It seems obvious to me that everything we could possibly need to cure ourselves is right here in front of us.

But, after millions of dollars researching synthetic drugs, pharmaceutical companies are now coming back to nature. And it's already paid off.

Take the remarkable anti-cancer properties found in soil bacteria.

It's helping bone cancer patients at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. In fact, the "dirt drug," as it's been coined, is teamed with a more conventional medicine. And the end result is a boost in its medicinal power.

Scientists are looking for that next drug on the land and in the sea.

The possibilities are endless...

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Michelle Miller is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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I met Lady Bird Johnson when I was a young journalist in the early 1990s. Reporting for the Orange County News, I was covering her visit to commemorate an exhibit at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.

Well into her 70s, she could still command an audience of eager listeners, as Roosevelt did with his fire-side chats. At the time, she was perhaps the most famous political or historic figure I'd ever met.

The wife of the president who signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, I would later discover that this yellow rose of Texas was truly a magnolia of steel in the fight to win sympathy for blacks in the South. You see, Southern ladies of clout, conscience and conviction like Johnson were quietly and effectively talking up the virtues of equal rights in the language that "Old Dixie" might be able to hear.

These tales I would hear from a most reliable source over lunch at Commander's Palace in New Orleans some six years ago. Another grand dame, Ambassador Lindy Boggs, would tell me of her friendship with the now late Lady Byrd Johnson. Their husbands had been great friends and colleagues in Congress -- Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader of the Senate, Hale Boggs as Majority Leader of the House.

At the time of the Voting Rights Act, President Johnson wielded his influence as a former senator to win over hesitant members of Congress. But in attempting to gain support from the masses the two men enlisted their wives...

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Michelle Miller is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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Who DOESN'T like chocolate?

It's an American favorite.

Our sweet tooth usually gravitates toward the milk varieties, laden with fat and sugar.

But dark chocolate sales are on the rise, up 40% last year.

I'm not ashamed to say, I belong to the body of chocolate lovers that doesn't mind the bitter with the sweet.

So when I read a new study touting the health benefits of dark chocolate, my interest was piqued.

The study, (reported in Tuesday's Journal of the American Medical Association) looked at 44 people between the ages of 54 and 76 with hypertension. All of them reported a drop in their blood pressure after 18 weeks of eating a 30 calorie a day serving of dark chocolate.

That's the equivalent of one and a half Hershey's dark chocolate Kisses.
But who eats only one or two of those?

I usually hit 10 before the self control kicks in.

So if I'm the average American, and that's my average serving, then why wouldn't a study measure what Americans are more LIKELY to eat?

Mind you, there have been other studies that have found similar results, but those have been funded by the chocolate industry.

So this one may have more clout from an ethics standpoint, but in America, the premise of "size matters" rules.

Portion size that is.

And until we curtail THAT aspect of our appetites, I'm waiting for a study that shows our true colors.

As a CBS News correspondent, I learn something new every day. My latest education: oral contraception and its history. It came through reporting on Lybrel, the controversial new birth-control pill that was just approved by the FDA.

Lybrel eliminates the monthly menstrual cycle — indefinitely. Women take it every single day for as long as they hope to avoid pregnancy.

The choice to keep or dispense with periods is now up to the women of America. Lybrel's maker, Wyeth, and even doctors involved in its clinical trials say it's no riskier than taking traditional birth-control pills.

Other health care professionals would prefer more study on Lybrel's long-term effects. But no matter where you fall in the argument, here are some facts I found very interesting:

All forms of the pill work by stopping ovulation and suppressing periods.
That should mean, technically, women taking the traditional "three weeks on/one week off" pill packet shouldn't bleed every month. But they do.

According to longtime contraceptive researcher Sheldon Segal, a professor of pharmacology at Cornell Medical School, those aren't "real periods." Women on traditional birth-control pills aren't shedding an unfertilized egg with the uterine lining. They're experiencing hormone withdrawal bleeds from the placebo effect.

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