Abc News

ABC News correspondent Elizabeth Vargas concedes that her network is stepping into a theological minefield with its one-hour exploration of whether Jesus Christ had a wife. The ABC News special, "Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci," is scheduled to air Monday at 8 p.m. "You can't talk about this subject without intriguing people or offending people," Vargas said Thursday. "We're trying to do it as respectfully as we can." ABC screened the special for some reporters and religious leaders on Thursday.

The team for CNN's new morning show is in place. Now it just needs a name and a time and a launch date. As expected, former ABC News correspondent Chris Cuomo is to host. The surprise is who is joining him. His co-host is to be Kate Bolduan, a CNN congressional correspondent and a co-anchor of "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. " There had been speculation about Erin Burnett moving from evenings to mornings, but that switch proved to be hard sell with her. Joining the new show as its news anchor is Michaela Pereira, who is known to Los Angeles viewers from her hosting duties on KTLA's morning show.

Bowing to economic pressures, ABC News is launching a top-to-bottom restructuring that will shrink the staff by as much as 25% and dramatically reorient the way it gathers and produces the news. ABC News President David Westin laid out the plan in an e-mail to employees Tuesday, saying the network "will undergo a fundamental transformation that will ultimately affect every corner of the enterprise." The emphasis in the pared-down news division will be on "digital journalists" who can both produce and shoot their own stories, a model increasingly being adopted in television news.

The 5-year-old Alabama boy who was held hostage in an underground bunker saw his kidnapper shot to death, his mother told TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw in an interview set to broadcast Wednesday. The exclusive interview deflates the last of the privacy cocoon that had been erected around Ethan, now 6, and his mother after 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes boarded a school bus Jan. 29, shot its driver and took the boy hostage. In excerpts of the interview released to promote Dr. Phil's Wednesday show -- bumpered by Jerry Bruckheimer-esque action-movie music -- the boy's mother, Jennifer Kirkland, said that she wanted to take the boy's place in the bunker and that she asked to speak with Dykes.

A top producer at ABC News has decided to join the Pepsi generation. Jon Banner, who has spent more than 25 years at ABC News and played a key role in the network's coverage of the world,  is getting out of journalism to become a senior vice president of global strategy and planning at the food and soft drink giant PepisCo Inc.  During his tenure at ABC News, Banner won 15 Emmys. He was the longtime executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight" and more recently oversaw the Sunday news program "This Week" and played a big part in the network's overall political coverage.

At a time when network news faces unprecedented competition for its audience, ABC News has tapped a new president who brings not only a traditional broadcast pedigree but also an eclectic background as an author and Internet entrepreneur. The network is betting that those skills can help it adjust to the Digital Age. Newly named president Ben Sherwood will succeed David Westin, who announced in September that he would step down. He assumes the helm of ABC News at a key moment: The division has been ravaged by staff cuts, must grapple with how to respond to opinionated and provocative cable rivals, and faces scores of anonymous competitors breaking news on Twitter.

Thursday night, retiring ABC anchor Charles Gibson was feted by colleagues in a Lincoln Center reception hall overlooking the Hudson River. Among the hundreds on hand, one person was conspicuously absent: Diane Sawyer, who succeeds him tonight on the network's flagship evening newscast, "World News." She was already on assignment, headed to Copenhagen to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for an exclusive interview to kick off her tenure. It was a move that speaks volumes about her ambitions for "World News" -- a post she has long sought.

Beef Products Inc., a South Dakota meat company whose lean, finely textured beef product was dubbed "pink slime" this year, has sued ABC News for defamation and is seeking $1.2 billion in damages. The company, which after the controversy closed three of its four plants and laid off 700 workers, filed suit in state court in Elk Point, S.D., this week. It alleges that ABC News' coverage of the "pink slime" controversy misled consumers into believing that the product was unsafe, even though it had been approved for human consumption by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Katie Couric is moving back to her comfort zone: daytime TV. The popular news personality and the Walt Disney Co.-owned ABC television network on Monday announced a comprehensive deal that includes a high-profile role for Couric beginning this summer within the ABC News division, and starting in September 2012, the launch of a syndicated daytime talk show. Couric will produce and own the talk show along with her onetime "Today" show producer, former NBCUniversal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker.

ABC News President Ben Sherwood said reporter Brian Ross' speculation that James Holmes, the suspect in the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., could be linked to the tea party "did not live up to the standards and practices of ABC News. " "We put something on the air that we did not know to be true and the part that we needed to be true was not germane to the story we were covering," Sherwood told reporters at the semiannual Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills. "This was an unfortunate mistake," he said, adding that the network was taking steps to make sure it does not happen again, although he declined to say specifically what those steps were.

After the coffee. Before taking cough medicine as a preemptive move. The Skinny: It's raining here but it's 10 degrees in New York, so I guess I won't complain too much. I also won't complain that it was a slow news day. Stories include Netflix's surprising fourth-quarter results and Fox shaking up its Tuesday schedule. Daily Dose: Maybe NBC News anchor Brian Williams should just give up the anchorman thing and switch to comedy. Already practically a recurring character on "30 Rock," he's now going to appear on E!

Barbara Walters is on the road to recovery after taking a tumble at an inauguration party over the weekend. "Barbara went to Washington to cover the inauguration," Whoopi Goldberg, her co-host on "The View," said on the show Tuesday. "She missed a step and had a fall, which cut her upper temple. The doctors stitched her up, and she is doing fine, but they want her to take it easy. " The fall occurred Saturday when the ABC News veteran fell on a stair at the British ambassador's residence in Washington.

Barbara Walters had a slip Saturday night, but her employer says the 83-year-old newswoman will be OK. Walters fell on a staircase while visiting the British ambassador's home in Washington for an inauguration party. She cut her forehead during the tumble. "Out of an abundance of caution, she went to the hospital to have her cut tended to, have a full examination and remains there for observation," an ABC spokesman wrote in a statement. "Barbara is alert (and telling everyone what to do)

Hannah Sansburn never saw it coming. On Tuesday, her ex-boyfriend Jacob Tyler Roberts-- masked and armed with an AR-15 rifle -- killed two people and wounded another in a suburban Portland mall, before turning the gun on himself, authorities say. “This is the last thing I would have ever expected - -especially from him. He was just too sweet,” she told ABC News. “He never would hurt anybody. I mean the only way that you would ever get him to be … physical with you is if you were tickling him,” she said.

A former employee of Beef Products Inc. is suing ABC News, anchor Diane Sawyer, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and others, saying that their use of the phrase “pink slime” ultimately cost him his job. Bruce Smith was among 750 people laid off by the South Dakota beef processor earlier this year amid fears over the safety and quality of a meat product dubbed “pink slime” by critics.  The product, known in the industry as lean finely textured beef,...

A sex scandal is roiling Waffle House 's chairman, and like the chain's hash browns, he has been scattered, covered and peppered in the news this week. After being accused of sexual harassment by a former employee, Joseph Rogers Jr. claimed he had been blackmailed, according to ABC News .  The Waffle House chairman's former housekeeper filed an incident report with the Atlanta Police Department alleging that he had demanded she perform sexual acts on him in order to keep her job. Rogers said that during a nearly eight-year period, he had a "series of infrequent consensual sexual encounters" with the woman, who ABC News was not identifying due to the allegations, but claimed he was a victim of blackmail.

ABC News and Yahoo Inc. are deepening their already cozy relationship in the hopes of creating a digital news juggernaut. Under the new agreement, ABC will become the premier news provider to Yahoo and produce original content, including an online version of "Good Morning America" specifically for the venture. "We think we can revolutionize the online digital news landscape," Yahoo Executive Vice President Ross Levinsohn declared at a glitzy news conference at ABC's "Good Morning America" studio in New York.

The person claiming to have scrawled on a Mark Rothko mural painting over the weekend at London's Tate Gallery remains at large, but the individual has spoken to various news outlets, including the BBC News and ABC News, saying that he is not a vandal and that his actions have actually improved the value of the artwork. On Sunday, a painting in Rothko's Seagram series was defaced with writing on its lower right corner. According to photographs published online, the scrawling featured the name "Vladimir Umanets" and a reference to "yellowism.

After the coffee. Before seeing if I can land a judging gig on Fox's "The X Factor. " The Skinny: This weekend, I'll see if the Redskins are for real or if last week's win was a fluke. And maybe I'll see a movie. Friday's headlines include a look at the weekend box office, ABC News getting sued and "The X Factor" failing to set the world on fire in its season debut. Daily Dose: The cable industry is keeping a close eye on the Federal Communications Commission, which must decide in the next three weeks whether to keep its program access rules alive.