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Meredith Vieira couldn’t stop staring at Charla Nash’s face.

That’s nothing new for Nash – nearly three years after a horrific chimp attack literally tore her face off, she’s gotten used to people staring. What was new was the reason for the attention.

“Wow. You really look fantastic,” Vieira told Nash. “I’m just—I— I apologize. I’m looking at your face and I am in awe.”

After a full face transplant, Nash has begun venturing out into public again, no longer worried her severely disfigured face would frighten people.

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SAN JOSE MINE, Chile — Chile’s trapped miners were shuttled up a narrow escape shaft to freedom and joyous reunions on Wednesday in a meticulously planned rescue operation that ended the longest underground entrapment in human history.

One after another, the miners climbed into a missile-like steel capsule barely wider than a man’s shoulders and took a 15-minute journey through 2,000 feet of rock to the surface.

All of the miners were freed Wednesday night in a rescue operation that advanced rapidly without hitches.

Scenes of jubilation erupted each time a miner arrived to a hero’s welcome above the San Jose gold and copper mine in Chile’s northern Atacama desert.

The last miner out was Luis Alberto Urzua, 54, the shift foreman credited with helping the trapped miners endure 17 days in isolation before Chileans discovered the men had survived the mine collapse.

“We have done what the entire world was waiting for,” he told Chilean President Sebastian Pinera immediately after his rescue. “The 70 days that we fought so hard were not in vain. We had strength, we had spirit, we wanted to fight, we wanted to fight for our families, and that was the greatest thing.”

The president told him: “You are not the same, and the country is not the same after this. You were an inspiration. Go hug your wife and your daughter.” With Urzua by his side, he led the crowd in singing the national anthem.

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Miami Heat guard LeBron James has a lot of work to do on his reputation. That’s at least according to the latest Q Score, released exclusively to CNBC, on Tuesday morning.

Following James’ move from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat, and the way he announced it in the ESPN hour-show dubbed “The Decision,” the general population has changed its opinion of the man nicknamed King.

In January 2010, The Q Scores Company took a poll of the general population and found that 24 percent of people thought of James in a positive light, compared to a 22 percent negative opinion.

Henry Schafer, executive vice president of the company, told CNBC that the average sports personality has a 15 percent positive score and a 24 percent negative score.

“LeBron’s positive score at that time was the highest we had ever seen it,” Schafer said.

But since “The Decision” show on July 8, things have gone seriously downhill for the NBA star.

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MSNBC‘s Contessa Brewer has apologized for mixing up civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

She made the slip-up Wednesday while introducing Jackson during a segment on homelessness.

After the introduction, Jackson stared at the camera from a studio in Burbank, Calif., and said, “I’m Rev. Jesse Jackson.”

Brewer explained that her script read that she was to introduce “the Rev. Al Sharpton.”

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No decision she ever made or ever expects to make was more agonizing or more controversial. After 18 months of pouring her love and efforts into bonding with her adoptive son, Anita Tedaldi realized it wasn’t working and gave the child to another family.

“I loved him and I cared deeply for him,” Tedaldi told TODAY’s Matt Lauer Thursday in New York. “I tried to do the same exact thing I did with my biological children, but over time it became clear that our family maybe wasn’t a good match for him, that we were unable to meet some of his needs.”

Tedaldi inspired both praise and condemnation when she wrote in The New York Times’ Motherlode blog about the orphan boy she and her husband adopted — whom, they learned, had been found abandoned at the side of a road .

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