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Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Feb 23, 2012
February 23, 2012
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Equal time:
Threatening letters have been received at the offices of about a half dozen members of the House and Senate and more could be on the way.
The letters contained a powdery substance, which, so far, has been found to be harmless. The letters have a Portland, OR, address. The FBI is checking it out. The writer, who sent warnings about the tainted letters to various newspapers, expresses vague grievances about corporate money in politics and he's demanding a Constitutional Convention. (Maiman)Bottom feeding:
WHITNEY HOUSTON graced the cover of the ever-classy National Enquirer yesterday, but in a different way than usual: The tabloid ran a photo of Houston's body in her coffin that was snapped by someone --probably using a cell-phone-- at a private viewing at the Whigham Funeral Home in Newark, NJ, before her funeral. The tabloid claims it's the last photo ever taken of Whitney. They made the same claim in 1977 with an open casket shot of ELVIS PRESLEY. Whitney was wearing her favorite purple dress, $500-thousand dollars worth of jewelry and gold slippers. The photo (uncensored version here) provoked outrage from Houston’s fans on Twitter after it was published yesterday. (Maiman /Marino)
Broadcast, cable and video news:
MEAT LOAF has signed to guest star on the USA Network’s show "Fairly Legal" this spring.
TVLine says he'll be in episode nine of this season, playing an old-school, blue-collar transportation union boss with a dirty mouth who wields an iron fist as he threatens to bring San Francisco to a halt in order to protect his workers.
Meat (or, as I like to call him, Mister Loaf) has been a guest star on several TV shows like "Monk" and "House," had a stint on "Celebrity Apprentice," and did a cameo during "Glee’s" "Rocky Horror Picture Show" tribute as well.Off the beaten path:
We have a new world record today for the world's tallest stack of pancakes.
The Huffington Post says, after several failed attempts, Australian ANDY WROBEL finally managed to stack 60 pancakes on top of one another. The finished stack measured two-point-49-feet. The world record stack eventually collapsed. But, luckily, officials from the Guinness Book were able to measure it first.
The previous record was for a stack that measured two-point-42-feet in Croatia back in 2008. (Still)Health and Medical Briefs:
In recent years we’ve been told that teenagers need more sleep than the rest of us, but recent findings suggest that’s not necessarily true.
A BYU study in the Eastern Economics Journal suggests seven hours of sleep for older teens, eight hours for 12-year-olds and nine hours for 10-year-olds.
The study found that teenagers who got seven hours of sleep did better on tests than teenagers who got nine hours of sleep.
National guidelines recommend at least eight hours a night for adolescents, but that’s unrealistic since many teens are overloaded with homework, extracurricular activities and part-time jobs. On top of that, a lot of teenagers like to stay up late texting their friends or browsing Facebook. But standardized test performances show 16-year-olds score best with about seven hours of sleep. (Page) -
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