Elizabeth Smart's New Job

Elizabeth Smart and her father

Elizabeth Smart, who in 2002 and 2003 endured nine months of captivity and sexual abuse after she had been kidnapped at age 14 from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah has a new job. As a commentator for ABC News, she will focus on helping viewers understand missing person and child abduction cases. She'll be a regular contributor to Good Morning America.

"I can confirm that Elizabeth Smart will be an ABC News contributor available to all ABC News programs and platforms," ABC News spokeswoman Julie Townsend told The Cutline. The news was first reported Wednesday night by the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz, who was reasonably skeptical about Smart's addition to the ABC contributor roster.

Newsweek and The Daily Beast Merge

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A merger between Newsweek and the Daily Beast will be announced this morning with former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown at its helm, according to the New York Daily News. The New York Observer broke the news late Thursday night, which Brown confirmed on her Web site. "The union of The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine finally took place with a coffee-mug toast between all parties Tuesday evening," wrote Brown, who helped launch the reporting and opinion site the Daily Beast in 2008. "The final details were only hammered out last night." Speculation about the merger has swirled for weeks, with the deal seeming to hang by a thread as Brown wrestled for more editorial control from Newsweek owner Sidney Harman, 91, who bought the ailing news magazine in August for $1. Brown wrote of her desire to work with Harman to "restore Newsweek to its glory days" and infuse the older publication with some of the "new creative energy" that has helped draw 5 million unique visits per month to the Beast, according to Brown.

Source: Slate.com

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Obama Not Muslim: The Roots of Americans’ Baseless Beliefs - The Daily Beast

Tunku Varadarajan wrote an interesting article for The Daily Beast on the baseless beliefs of some Americans that President Obama is Muslim. There's a hint on the contentin the title of the article.."America the Ignorant".  I thought it was worth sharing and worth the time to read.

Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU's Stern Business School. He is a former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal.

Click the link below to access the article:

Obama Not Muslim: The Roots of Americans’ Baseless Beliefs - The Daily Beast

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