All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

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.

>Don Teague is a CBS News Correspondent in the Dallas bureau.

There are three words that bring joy to the hearts of parents, and dread to their children. Three words that feel like freedom for grownups, and prison for kids. Three words, that seem to get more expensive every year:

Back to School

I have to admit, that even 25 plus years after graduating high school, I still get a little nervous adrenaline rush on the first day of a school year. I guess most of us never completely recover from high school.

In Texas, about 4.8 million public school students went back to school this morning after the long summer break, my two teenaged daughters among them. They joined millions of other kids around the country who are now trying to figure out if they got the hard history teacher or the easy one, a good locker location or a bad one, if this will finally be the year they keep that pledge to do their homework early.

I, on the other hand, am joining the millions of parents doing serious checkbook math today, trying to figure where all the money went.

I actually know where it went. I just can’t quite believe it.

Consider these statistics for a moment. 62 percent of college seniors have four or more credit cards. That's not a typo. Four or more. Crazy, right? With an average balance on these cards of more than $4,000 these seniors are entering the real world already saddled with hefty credit card debt.

For our Children of the Recession piece airing tonight on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, I interviewed Shanetta Francis, a recent graduate of Trenton High School in New Jersey who could not wait to get her hands on plastic.

"Because I heard so much about credit cards and how they raise your limit and you can get black cards and gold cards or platinum cards and I was like I cannot wait until I turn 18," she told me.

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I visited the camp for our "Children of the Recession" story which airs tonight on We wanted to explore whether the recession has prompted more parents and teachers to start teaching kids Finance 101.

At least 50 eight and nine year olds were seated on the floor in front of me and I asked them questions such as: why is it important to save, what's a credit card, etc. but then I wondered if any of them actually knew someone who lost a job so I asked.

I never expected such a huge response.

Easily, three-quarters of them raised their hands.

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CBS News correspondent Seth Doane talks with 13-year-old Lewis Roman.

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My favorite part of this job is getting the chance to sit down and chat with someone I'd never normally meet. The microphone can sometimes act as a little passport into a stranger's life …

You talk with a lot of people in the course of a week or month in this line of work and sometimes someone sticks out from the rest. On this story it was 13-year-old Lewis Roman, whom I met in a shelter in Philadelphia. Lewis sleeps in one room with his mother, brothers, and sister while he goes to school and tries to have a normal teenage life. We were there to talk with Lewis about hunger and he tells his story in tonight's latest "Children of the Recession" piece on the CBS Evening News piece.

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Katie's off today. This is Randall Pinkston.

Every year, more than one million American children experience homelessness, according to a recent study. That's one in 50. Perhaps a parent got laid off and there was no money for rent, or maybe the family home was lost to a bank foreclosure. Whatever the reason, it's a story that keeps repeating in cities all around the country.

These children aren't all living in cardboard boxes or sleeping under a bridge. Many are in temporary shelters or motel rooms, often in cramped and uncomfortable situations that are a long way from a real home. Those who are able to stay in school may show side effects like low self-esteem and lower grades. The emotional scars they are developing could be there for many years to come.

With two million additional home foreclosures expected in the coming months, we could see more kids with no space to call their own, children who are forced to bear the burden of adult problems, though they share none of the blame.

This was one of those stories that evolved while we were shooting. Our assignment was to look at the psychological impact of the recession on young people for our network-wide series, "Children of the Recession.” As we conducted background research we chatted with psychologists who spoke to the idea that in the early stages of development any changes can be disruptive to young people. We decided to focus our piece on teenagers for whom "fitting in" is particularly important.

We set out to profile one teenage girl, Kristen Beltran, who lives in Montclair, Calif. When we visited her school, Montclair High School, we saw how schools are becoming the first line of defense for many students when their parents are no longer able to provide as much at home. Our story started to shifted focus a bit to reflect some of the stories we heard at Montclair High.

CBS Evening News Producer Karen Raffensperger had identified Kristen as a person to profile after she came across her blog entries. Kristen vented her frustrations about the impact of the recession on her own life. Her dad (a welder) is not working as much these days and that has strained the family's finances. At 15 years old, she'd love to get a job to help her parents pay some of their bills, but her parents will not let her because they want her to focus on schoolwork.


CBS Evening News Producer Karen Raffensperger had identified Kristen as a person to profile after she came across her blog entries. Kristen vented her frustrations about the impact of the recession on her own life. Her dad (a welder) is not working as much these days and that has strained the family's finances. At 15 years old, she'd love to get a job to help her parents pay some of their bills, but her parents will not let her because they want her to focus on schoolwork.



On the front stoop of their home, Kristen's dad admitted to me that tension is growing within the family. Kristen's mother Betty explained, as we sat around a table in the back yard, that it's "our job as parents to protect our children." For Betty and her husband "protecting the kids" means keeping some of the specifics about family finances between themselves. However, Kristen says that can be counter-productive as she's aware of what is going on and only feels more helpless.

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CBS News and USA Today have launched a week-long series "Children of the Recession," which looks at the impact on children from the nation's economic woes. Complete coverage for the series is at the Children of the Recession page.

A new CBS News poll poll found nearly four-in-ten parents say the recession is affecting the lives of their children. Nearly a-third of parents say the recession has had a lot of impact on their family. And at some point over the past six months, 60 percent of parents have had to tell their kids they might not have as much money to spend as they used to. Two-thirds of parents believe children lacking health insurance is a very serious problem.

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They share none of the blame for America's economic crisis, yet they shoulder all of the consequences.

That is too much of a burden for any child to bear.

Since the recession began, more than one million children have lost health insurance as their parents lose their jobs.

One in 50 American children is homeless, and as more homes go into foreclosure that number will rise.

Beginning next week, CBS News will show you the suffering the recession is causing children, and the solutions some people have found, like a program that provides temporary placement for kids whose parents just can't make ends meet, and a high school where teachers are spending their own money to pay for their students' test fees, prom dresses, in some cases, even food.

Our economy impacts banks and bottom lines, but at CBS News we're making a network-wide commitment to shine a spotlight on people we cannot afford to ignore: the Children of the Recession.

That's a page from my notebook.

Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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No country for young women?

SO country for old men.

That was my email exchange with a new colleague, Brandon Baur, as he came to assist my producer Mark Hooper and me on our coverage of this story. There isn't anything funny about polygamy, but I think the longer you are grinding through a story, especially one with as many emotional landmines that trigger immediate visceral responses in you, the more you try to insulate yourself from the bizarre nature of what you're looking at.

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