All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Froot Loops, Cookie Crisp, Reese's Puffs - I almost got a cavity just reading that. Yet, they're the kinds of sugary cereals children beg for at the grocery store.

The boxes and T-V ads usually have a colorful cartoon character on them. But, one group of researchers is not amused.

The Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University reports that cereal companies spend more than $156 million a year on ads geared for kids.

At a time when 12 percent of U.S. children from ages 2 to 5 are considered obese - along with 17 percent of kids 6 to 11 - this problem is anything but sweet.

All parents have been there in that grocery aisle - having to decide between what the kids want and what you know is better for them.

But maybe some oatmeal for your Little Miss Sweet Tooth can help her avoid big health issues in the future.

Don't let a bunny or a tucan take over your parenting role. Tell them you are coo coo for good nutrition, not for Cocoa Puffs.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

Mandy Clark is a CBS News Digital Journalist based in Afghanistan. In this blog, she previews her story for the CBS Evening News.

Nine young boys were tricked into delivering a bomb for the Taliban. It is the story of Eidullah and his friends. I came across the story on a military base in Khost, Eastern Afghanistan when a few of the boys had come for a check up. Military doctors saved their lives.

The boys were asked to deliver a fruit basket to a local commander working with U.S. forces. What they didn’t know was hidden in the basket was a bomb. It exploded early and injuring the boys. Two lost legs, one went blind, all their lives changed in a flash.

Using children is new terror tactic that is growing in Afghanistan. Doctors at the combat hospital say they are seeing child bombers more frequently.
Eidullah was one of the boys who lost his leg. When I met him, his face was etched with worry. He used to run his father’s shop in his village. His father is blind and as the oldest son it’s up to him to take care of his mother and 6 siblings. He doubts he can. It is hard to believe such responsibility for an 11-year-old.

Nine year old Mohammad’s father begged doctors not to amputate his leg, but the blast took out his sciatic nerve. His right leg is now dead. He has no feeling and no control over it. It will need to be removed in the future but the doctors respected the father’s wishes.

Even when it is amputated, it’s unlikely Eidullah or Mohammad will ever get a prosthetic leg, they are simply too poor to afford it. They will join the 50 thousand other Afghan civilians amputated by 30 years of continuous war.
Despite the agony from their injuries, not one of the boys complained. They were near stoic with their new reality given to them by a terrorist.

The bombing that changed the lives of these boys happened on September 11th. A terrible reminder of how it always seems to be their lives of the innocence that are torn apart by terrorism and war.

With her warbling voice and statuesque figure, Julia Child spiced up the lives of millions who bought her cookbooks and watched her famous TV show.

Well now, she's topping the bestseller list again, posthumously. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" sold 22-thousand copies in a week - nearly half a century after it was written.

The film Julie & Julia is one ingredient in this new found success - but maybe there's more to it.

Julia Child taught us all that cooking is an art and eating with family and friends is the most important part of the day.

Americans spend more than $500 billion dollars a year in restaurants. We grab meals on the run and even eat in our cars.

Julia began her career in post-war France and learned the value of homemade food served at humble tables.

The recession has many of us reordering our priorities and her life and work could provide some serious food for thought.

As she used to say, Bon Appetit!

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

George Osterkamp is the CBS News producer in the San Francisco Bureau. He worked with Correspondent John Blackstone on this story for the CBS Evening News.

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We discovered Mia through the therapist who had been helping the little girl overcome the terrible abuse she suffered when she was less than a year old. Dr. Lenore Terr, a San Francisco psychiatrist whose specialty is childhood trauma, had written a book about Mia called "Magical Moments of Change: How Psychotherapy Turns Kids Around."

Dr. Terr was the host when I met Mia and her mother, Sharon Behrens, nearly a year ago at the doctor’s office. At that meeting the women and Mia – then 18 – all seemed so self-assured and warm, it was hard to imagine the struggles the three had gone through to save Mia from the lasting damage early trauma often causes.

“She growled. She spit. She hissed. She screamed,” Terr recalled of Mia’s early days starting treatment. Terr knew the odds were against Mia, but the doctor sensed an intelligence in the frightened little girl – and in that, she found hope.

Using dolls and a tea service, Terr worked with Mia for years to overcome her fear of others.

“We made reality out of the tea party,” Terr said. “And it was no more a game. It was reality.”

Mia’s therapy was both mental and physical ...

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

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After hearing of her accomplishments, I couldn’t believe how tiny the shy little girl appeared. Not even five feet tall, here was a formidable heroine in her native Yemen, a child whose bold proclamation gave power to women across the world.

I met her outside of Dylan’s Candy Store in New York City’s Upper East Side. It was before she accepted her Glamour Magazine’s Woman of the Year Award under the glare of the bright lights of Carnegie Hall. She hid quietly under the comforting posture of her lawyer, Shada Nassar, and the interpreter assigned to her for the day. But here was a girl who was strong beyond measure.

Nujood Ali was married at the age of nine to a man three times her age. It’s not an uncommon practice. Roughly half of Yemeni girls are married before 18, some as young as 8 years old. But it’s unusual and unlawful for those marriages to be consummated before the bride turns 15. But in Nujood’s case, her husband didn’t wait. And after enduring several weeks of abuse, Nujood one morning boarded a bus to head off to court in the city of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. There she would wait for a judge to notice her. And there she would tell him, "I want a divorce."

He took her home to shelter her from her family, and then introduced her to Shada Nassar, one of a handful of female lawyers who is a staunch women’s rights advocate. Based on her husband’s own admission that he had slept with her, Nujood was granted a divorce. Since then, she’s inspired ...

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Kelly Wallace is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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Stories about child abuse have always horrified me – but maybe more so now that I have two beautiful children of my own. When I hear about the incomprehensible things mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, stepfathers and stepmothers, do to their loved ones, I look at my little ones and wonder how on earth anyone could hurt the most vulnerable, these little life forces who rely on us to take care of them and give them a happy life.

So needless to say, when I was pitched a story about how few Americans are actually reporting abuse when they suspect it, I knew it was something I wanted to do. When I learned more, including how four children die every day from child abuse and neglect – that’s right four children dying every day – I thought if there were more public awareness, maybe more lives could be saved.

I had a chance to talk with 26-year-old Julia Charles, who is one of the most inspirational young women I have talked with in my reporting career. She endured years of brutal beatings as a kid at the hands of her biological mother. She uses the term "biological mother" because she’s since been adopted by her foster mother whom she calls her mom.

"I remember scrubbing the bathtub and getting hit ...

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As much as I've heard and read about "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) — the landmark education bill President Bush signed into law five years ago, I had no idea that every state uses a different test and standard to determine whether its schools are making the required progress under the law.

It is an issue, we learned, that is debated sharply in education circles — with some states accusing others of lowering the bar by using easier tests and lower standards to make their schools look more successful.

Why would they do this? Well, the stakes couldn't be higher. A school that is identified as not meeting NCLB targets — the requirement is 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014 — could face sanctions or ultimately be shut down.

What we learned is that, like most subjects, this topic can't be broken down into right and wrong or black and white. It's much more complicated than that — and states, at least the ones we visited, appear to be trying to do the right thing, which is give their kids the best education they possibly can.

Consider the places we traveled: Georgia and neighboring South Carolina. The two states have nearly identical scores on a national reading test for fourth graders (around 26 percent proficiency) but dramatically different results on their state tests. South Carolina's fourth-graders had a 36 percent proficiency rating in reading, while Georgia's was 87 percent.

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Grim tidings today from London and a new report that tells us something else about the tragedy that is Iraq:

The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, according to a report released Tuesday that placed the country last in its child survival rankings.

(AP Photo/Ali Abed)

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it had made the least progress toward improving child survival rates.

Iraq's mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990. Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by electricity shortages, a lack of clean water and too few hospitals.

The publication, which used data from 1990-2005, also determined that gains in survival rates in some of the world's poorest countries — including Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland — were declining.

The report also says: "Among industrialized countries, Iceland had the best child survival rate, and Romania the worst. The United States placed 26th, tied with Croatia, Estonia and Poland. Nearly seven children die for every 1,000 live births in the United States."