Source: USA TODAY
Sometimes it’s hard to get going on tasks such as planning your fiscal future. But reporters at WUSA in Washington, D.C., are here to help with a half-yearly financial checkup.
Check out these easy-to-follow tips for getting started on budgeting and saving.
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
Some rumors are so good, that they even get the movie stars involved believing. Even if it’s only for a few minutes.
Robert Pattinson woke up Saturday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, the morning after his triumphant premiere in Cosmopolis, and saw internet reports that he was being considered for Catching Fire, the sequel to the The Hunger Games.
“I woke up this morning and saw all these things about me being cast in The Hunger Games,” Pattinson tells USA TODAY. “I was kind of curious for a second. So I called my agent.”
The response?
“My agent was like, ‘No,’ ” Pattinson reports.
“(My agent) was like no one’s going to offer you that part,” Pattinson says, breaking into a laugh. “I was like, thanks for the reassurance.”
But Pattinson was riding a high after his new film Cosmopolis (due out in the U.S. in August) received a standing ovation in Cannes with girlfriend Kristen Stewart in attendance.
Even that was stressful. The ovation came after director David Cronenberg warned him that the Cannes audience can be harsh.
“David tells me the night before, ‘I’m fully expecting some boos,’ ” says Pattinson. “I was literally like, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ “
“I literally didn’t watch one second of the movie, I was waiting for people to walk out,” says Pattinson. “I was expecting a fight.”
It was only hours afterwards that Pattinson was able to wind down at the film’s afterparty.
“It took a full three hours of continued panic,” says Pattinson. “Full adrenaline. It was just too weird.”
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
After 33 years, someone has confessed to killing 6-year-old Etan Patz. And people immediately start speaking of “closure.”
Patty Wetterling hates the word.
Since 1989, she and her husband have writhed in the same hell as Stan and Julie Patz. Whatever path they might have been on, it was irrevocably altered that October evening when a masked man walked away with their 11-year-old boy, Jacob.
“Once you’re a victim of a crime like this, your life takes a very different direction,” the St. Joseph, Minnesota, woman says. “It doesn’t really close anything, because everything just became different from that point on. But it does provide answers.”
Thanks to the wonders of modern computer graphics, these parents can watch their children “age” — digitally, at least. But no one can write a program capable of generating the milestones — high school graduation, college, marriage, parenthood — that come along with growing up.
Some, like Mike and Maddi Misheloff of Dublin, California, exist in a kind of suspended animation, unwilling to move or even redecorate the lost one’s bedroom.
Many, like the Patzes, live with the “what ifs.” What if they hadn’t given in to his “please,” hadn’t let him make his first solo walk to the school bus stop that May day in 1979?
A few suffer under a cloud of suspicion themselves — like Judy Moore of Jackson, Kentucky, whose 6-year-old son, Kelly, disappeared in 1982 while playing in the snow.
Back when Etan vanished, authorities put the children’s faces on milk cartons. Today, their names and images flash across the Internet and digital highway signs.
It is a horrifying truth that the best some families can hope for is that their child is being held against their will, says activist John Walsh.
Before her rescue in 2009, Jaycee Dugard was repeatedly raped and gave birth to two daughters during 18 years of captivity at the hands of a known sex offender in California. Still, her mother could eventually put her arms around her again, says Walsh, host of television’s crime-fighting show America’s Most Wanted.
“Against all hope and reality, every now and then a child comes back alive,” says Walsh, whose 6-year-old son, Adam, was abducted from a Florida department store in July 1981 and murdered. “So that’s why these people keep their rooms and their phone numbers, because it’s part of the staying mentally sane. It’s part of the being able to cope with the worst possible thing that could ever happen to you — your beautiful, loving child disappears.”
Through his show, Walsh has helped capture more than 1,200 criminals and bring home about 60 missing children. He knows the Patzes and has shared their heartache each time a lead evaporated, and one “breakthrough” after another ended in disappointment.
“My wife has a wonderful saying,” says Walsh. “It’s like a mortal wound that you don’t die from. It heals over and it has a scab on it. And events like that crack it open, and it bleeds. It’ll never die.”
Across America, as the Patzes wait to see if they will at last get justice for Etan, parents’ hearts are bleeding anew.
•••
With their other two children grown and out on their own, the Misheloffs’ house is a bit too big for them. But they wouldn’t dream of moving while there is still a chance that Ilene might return.
“She has to come back to HER house,” her father says.
“This is her home,” his wife agrees. “We have to be here for her.”
They have left their daughter’s room just as it was on Jan. 30, 1989 — the day she vanished. Not as a shrine, Maddi Misheloff says, but simply because, “It’s her room.
“And on the daily hope that we’re getting her back,” she says.
Ilene was 13 when she disappeared on her way home from Wells Middle School to change into her figure-skating clothes. She had recently competed in her first regional meet, and her family had gotten permission for her to leave while everyone else was in last period.
That morning, Ilene was brushing her hair in the bathroom as Maddi Misheloff walked by on her way out the door to her office job at a physical therapy and medical supply company. The two exchanged a quick “I love you.”
Mike Misheloff, an engineer at a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, was driving Ilene and her twin brother, Brian, the mile or so to school. They were running late, and the kids bolted from the car as soon as their father pulled up at the school.
Ilene, a pretty girl with braces and curly brown hair, was wearing a charcoal gray pullover polo sweater, a horizontally striped pink and charcoal skirt, and black, low-top Keds sneakers. She was carrying a dark-blue backpack.
After school, she usually had a snack while she waited for her coach to come pick her up. But she never got home that day.
The couple have been in contact with police off and on since Ilene’s disappearance. But they haven’t heard anything since the beginning of the year, when the lead investigator was promoted and a new detective took his place.
Both parents have been following the Patz case. But a more recent event brought the emotions flooding back.
In the last few days, a Central Valley man was arrested in the disappearance of a 15-year-old girl. Although no body has been found, police say there is enough evidence to suspect a homicide, Mike Misheloff says.
“We want to know where our child is,” his wife says. “Every day without her is torture, and we want her back.”
•••
When Judy Moore heard that the Patzes second-guess their decision to let Etan walk to the bus stop alone that day, she wept.
“You’re reading my mind,” she says, the tears coming afresh. “It’s pitiful.”
Moore, 55, had lost one prematurely born baby at 5 weeks. A judge had given custody of her two older children to her parents because her epilepsy made it difficult for her to care for them, she says.
Kelly, her baby, was all she had left.
Moore and Kelly’s father, Bobby Hollan, were divorced. On Feb. 12, 1982, the mother and her son were living with Moore’s boyfriend in a rented house halfway up Pine Tree Hollow, near the town of Hindman in the eastern Kentucky mountains.
There was a dusting of snow on the ground. Kelly — a blue-eyed boy with a scar on his upper lip from an operation to repair a birth defect — had the day off from kindergarten and was begging to go outside and play.
After about two hours, Moore says, she relented. He pulled on his brown boots and the blue wind breaker with the torn zipper and headed for the door.
“He hugged me and said, ‘Mom, I love you,’” she says, her voice breaking.
It was around 11:30 a.m.
She sat on the bed and watched him out the window for a while. A couple of hours later, a neighbor yelled down to say that Moore’s sister was on the telephone.
When she came back home from the call, she says, Kelly was gone.
Moore assumed he was up the road at his friend Gordon’s house, where they watched The Dukes of Hazzard together. She went to the kitchen to fix dinner — soup beans and cornbread.
When Kelly didn’t come home for supper, she went up and down the hollow looking for him. It started snowing again.
Police brought out a cadaver dog. No trace was ever found.
Moore says she stopped contacting the police years ago.
“They keep trying to get me to confess to murder,” she says incredulously. “I understand that there’s mothers out there that do things like this. It makes me sick. I mean, how a mother can do something like that to their own flesh and blood, I’ll never understand it.”
She says her other two children believe the rumors. They are estranged.
She believes Kelly is still alive. If not, she takes comfort in the thought that he is “one of God’s little angels.”
“I shouldn’t have let him go out in the yard and play that day,” she says through her tears. “But I did. It’s just stuff that we do, and we can’t take it back. I wish we could, but we can’t.”
•••
The outgoing message on the Wetterlings’ answering machine says it all.
“Hope is an amazing force that we all need in our lives EVERY day,” Patty Wetterling’s voice declares.
The evening of Oct. 22, 1989, she and her chiropractor husband, Jerry, were going out to visit with friends. They asked Jacob, 11, to baby-sit his two younger siblings — Trevor, 10, and Carmen, 8.
They called home to give Jacob the phone number where they were, in case of an emergency. Not long afterward, the children called to say they were bored, and to ask permission to ride their bikes to the video store — about a mile away.
“No,” their mother said instinctively. “Find something to do at home.”
Trevor asked to speak to their dad. He promised they would take a flashlight; Jake would wear the father’s reflective jogging vest.
The parents conferred, then acquiesced. When Jacob called back around 8:30 to say that Carmen didn’t want to come, the Wetterlings agreed with his solution to have the 13-year-old neighbor girl sit with her until they got back with the movie.
“It should have been OK,” she says.
The brothers and a friend made it to the store, where they chose their movie —Leslie Nielsen’s cop comedy, The Naked Gun— and bought some candy. They were about halfway home when, the other two boys told authorities, a masked gunman emerged from a driveway.
He ordered them to throw their bikes into a ditch and lie down. After asking each boy his age, he told Trevor and the friend to run toward the nearby woods and not look back.
But after a short distance, they did turn around — just in time to see the man leading Jacob away by the elbow.
There have been many leads over the years.
“We have had leads in the last two weeks,” Wetterling says.
Wetterling was a stay-at-home mom when Jake vanished. Today, she is director of sexual violence prevention for the Minnesota Department of Health.
She takes heart in the fact that a relative turned in the man now charged with murdering Etan.
“We all need answers,” she says of her family, the Patzes and all the others. “We believe somebody else knows something … They’ve also carried an awful heavy load, and it’s time to come forward.”
But that doesn’t mean she has given up on finding Jacob alive.
“I’m not just looking for a murderer to come forward; I’m looking for information,” she says. “I pray for that.”
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
A devastated Henrik Lundqvist tried to explain his feelings and tried to make sense of the final goal — the Adam Henrique overtime rebound that sent the New York Rangers home for the summer and the New Jersey Devils to their first Stanley Cup Finals since 2003.
Lundqvist kept coming back to the same words. He was “disappointed,” “empty,” “hurt,” and still couldn’t make sense of a gut-punching, game-ending play that just happened too fast to make proper sense of it.
“Honestly, I don’t even know what happened. I don’t even remember,” Lundqvist said. “It was just a big scramble in front. It’s not a good feeling when you just feel all the guys on top of you, behind you, in front of you. It’s just a big scramble and nobody knows where the puck is. You’re just hoping for a whistle.”
The loss dropped the goaltender to 2-8 in his career in playoff overtimes. That included an 0-7 start trumped this postseason by a pair of dramatic overtime victories last round against Washington.
He finished with 26 saves on 29 shots, but was often at his best during New Jersey’s early onslaught. But that, two Game 7 wins and, perhaps, a Vezina Trophy, meant nothing after Friday’s loss.
The Devils walked off with the Eastern Conference title for the first time in nine years, beat the Rangers for just the second time in six playoff series and ended the Rangers’ streak of seven consecutive series wins when they held home-ice advantage.
• The Devils’ fourth line burned the Rangers again. Ryan Carter scored the game’s first goal, giving the combination of Carter, Stephen Gionta and Steve Bernier nine goals, 10 assists and a plus-16 rating this postseason. Carter and Gionta had both scored Wednesday night in New Jersey’s 5-3 Game 5 victory.
•Ruslan Fedotenko delivered against the Devils again, scoring the first Ranger goal when he punched home Ryan McDonagh’s wraparound try. He scored a point in five of the six games and finished the series with two goals and three assists after recording just two points (and no goals) in the first 14 playoff games.
• The offense was abysmal all postseason for the Rangers, but the main culprits against the Devils were Brad Richards and Marian Gaborik. They combined for one goal and four assists in the six games despite 35 shots on goal.
The highly paid duo finished the series with a minus-5 rating. Richards failed to score a goal and shot a loose puck into the body of a prone Martin Brodeur midway through the third period that could have given the Rangers a lead. Gaborik recorded just one point all series — a Game 5 goal he shot from behind the goal line that went in off Brodeur.
As a team, the Rangers scored just 30 even-strength goals in 20 games this postseason.
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
As polls shift back and forth, President Obama appears to enjoy a lead over Mitt Romney in the one contest that really counts: The Electoral College.
Obama is currently the favorite in states with 247 electoral votes, while Romney is in line for 206, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.
It takes 270 electoral votes to win the White House.
AP says its projections are based on “polls, ad spending and key developments in states, along with interviews with more than a dozen Republican and Democratic strategists both inside and outside of the two campaigns.”
As it stands now, the election would be decided in seven close states with a total of 85 electoral votes, AP reports: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.
From the AP report:
“As of today, the advantage still lies with the president, but there is a long and hard road ahead in this election,” said Tad Devine, who was a top strategist to Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry but isn’t directly involved in this year’s race.
If Romney wins all the states Republican John McCain carried in 2008 plus North Carolina, as trends today suggest he would, he would still need 64 electoral votes to hit the magic number. That would require him to win a majority of the states that are up for grabs.
Obama, on the other hand, faces the costly and labor-intensive challenge of defending those states in a much different environment than the one he enjoyed four years ago.
Big-spending, pro-Romney political committees are certain to be a factor, and already are running heavy levels of television ads in states where Obama is vulnerable, such as Florida.
But Obama’s early spending — more than $30 million on advertising before Memorial Day — and new glimmers of economic hope across the battleground states demonstrate the size of Romney’s challenge.
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — Former Penn State University president Graham Spanier has filed a civil lawsuit to force the school to release emails related to the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.
The lawsuit was filed late Friday in Centre County court and concerns an internal investigation, led by ex-FBI chief Louis Freeh, that Penn State is conducting about the scandal. It was first reported by the Centre Daily Times newspaper on its website.
Spanier isn’t asking for money in the lawsuit, which claims that he first was told Penn State emails from before 2004 didn’t exist and that he recently learned at least some of those emails have been retrieved but the school refuses to allow him to see them.
Spanier’s lawyers claim that Penn State attorneys were willing to send copies of the emails but allege the attorney general’s office asked the school not to do so. The lawsuit seeks to have a court force the school to give copies of the emails to Spanier so he can be better prepared to testify for the internal investigation.
Spanier also claims in the lawsuit that he offered to resign on Nov. 9 and trustees accepted that offer. Previous reports have said that he was fired or resigned under pressure.
Penn State spokeswoman Lisa Powers said Friday the school may not have a copy of the lawsuit and didn’t immediately respond to questions.
Spanier’s presidency ended four days after Sandusky was charged with dozens of sexual assault counts. Eight of 10 boys Sandusky is accused of abusing were attacked on campus, prosecutors allege. A former Penn State graduate assistant said he saw Sandusky in the football team shower with a boy a decade ago.
Sandusky has maintained his innocence, acknowledging he showered with boys but saying he never molested them. His wife, Dottie Sandusky, has said he is innocent and his accusers are making up their stories.
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
Every presidential election makes history, and we already know one of the legacies of 2012.
It’s the first race without a white male Protestant candidate from a major party.
President Obama is the nation’s first African-American chief executive; Mitt Romney will soon be the first Mormon within one step of the White House.
Race and religion will likely play a role in the election, but no one knows exactly how. Supporters of each candidate fear that being perceived as “an outsider” will hurt them.
As Jodi Kantor of The New York Times put it, the Obama and Romney campaigns “face the specter of longstanding prejudices that no ad, slogan or speech may be able to dispel.”
Kantor, who has a book out on the marriage of Barack and Michelle Obama, also writes:
In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey conducted last week, 27 percent of those polled said that having a Mormon president raised concerns for them or someone they know, and 12 percent said the same for a black president. Some voters say outright that they will not vote for Mr. Obama because he is black; others make jokes about Mr. Romney belonging to a cult. …
In public, both sides avow that the campaign is about substantive issues, and that religion and race will not determine who wins. In private, those close to Mr. Romney express concerns about faith that sound uncannily like those of their Democratic counterparts on race. Mr. Romney’s friends and aides frequently ask whether some of the things said and written about him would be uttered about a candidate of another religion. (“Would you have written this about a Jewish candidate?” his aides often ask reporters.) In interviews, some of his friends wished aloud for an organization like the Anti-Defamation League to patrol public discourse for anti-Mormon statements.
Their comments echo those of some Obama aides, who are nagged by the suspicion that he would be treated differently if he were white. (“Would this have been said about Bill Clinton?” is the question they often ask.) The subject came up again last week, when Representative Mike Coffman, Republican of Colorado, said that Mr. Obama was “not an American,” then apologized.
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY’s picks for book lovers include the new novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford, and a biography of famed foodie Craig Claiborne.
Canada
By Richard Ford; Ecco, 420 pp., $27.99; fiction
In 1960, when Dell Parsons was 15, his father, a retired Air Force captain, and his mother, a teacher, robbed a North Dakota bank. They got away with $2,500, but not for long. No one, including their twin son and daughter at home in Great Falls, Mont., thought them capable of such ruinous stupidity. That may sound like an implausible premise for a novel. But part of the magic of Richard Ford’s Canada is how his narrator, Dell, telling the story 50 years later, convinces readers otherwise.
USA TODAY says **** out of four. “A triumph of voice … heartbreaking.”
The Man Who Changedthe Way We Eat:>Craig Claiborne ebbbbband the American Food Renaissance
By Thomas McNamee; Free Press, 291 pp., $27; non-fiction
This new biography of the late, legendary New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne explores how he “changed the way we eat” — but also draws back the curtain on his unhappy personal life.
USA TODAY says *** out of four. “McNamee has done his homework, offering up a full portrait of Claiborne, whose life was not all crème fraiche.”
As the Crow Flies
By Craig Johnson; Viking, 308 pp., $25.95; fiction
In the latest in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, the Wyoming sheriff and his friend Henry Standing Bear witness a young Crow woman fall to her death from a cliff on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Longmire butts heads with the new tribal police chief as the investigation heats up.
USA TODAY says ***½ out of four. “Superb … a top-notch tale of complex emotions and misguided treachery.”
The Stonecutter
By Camilla Läckberg; Pegasus, 489 pp., $25.95; fiction
Swedish novelist Camilla Läckberg continues to make a name in America. In The Stonecutter, she weaves together two stories: one the contemporary investigation of the murder of a young girl in the coastal town of Fjällbacka; the other set a century ago of a wealthy young woman forced to marry a stonecutter following their torrid affair.
USA TODAY says ***½ out of four. “Equal parts atmospheric and suspenseful. … (Lackberg has) incomparable storytelling skills.”
The Presidents Club:Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity
By Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, Simon & Schuster, 527 pp., $32.50; non-fiction
Time magazine’s Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy bring “brilliant investigative work” to their study of the Oval Office, uncovering a powerful secret fraternity in which ex-presidents stay in the game by counseling their inexperienced successors.
USA TODAY says ***½ out of four. “A lucid and well-written glimpse into the modern presidency and its self-sustaining shadow organization.”
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
Vice President Biden says he learned the awful temptations of suicide after plunging into grief over the death of his wife and daughter nearly 40 years ago.
“For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” an emotional Biden said in recalling his wife’s fatal car accident in a speech to survivors of slain military service members.
“Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, (but) because they’d been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart they’d never get there again,” Biden said. “That it was … never going to be that way ever again. That’s how an awful lot of you feel.”
Biden spoke at an event organized by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), a non-profit advocacy group, in connection with Memorial Day weekend.
“There will come a day, I promise you, and your parents, as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye,” Biden told the military survivors. “It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later. But the only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I’m telling you it will come.”
Reports ABC News:
Biden described how he first learned of the accident on Dec. 18, 1972, just weeks after he was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware. While he was in Washington, D.C., his wife, Neilia, one-year-old daughter, Naomi, and sons, Beau and Hunter, were Christmas shopping in Hockessin, Del. Their car was struck by a tractor-trailer. Only Beau and Hunter survived.
“And just like you guys know by the tone of a phone call – you just knew, didn’t you? You knew when they walked up the path. You knew when the call came. You knew. You just felt it in your bones something bad happened,” Biden said. “And I knew. I don’t know how I knew. But the call said my wife was dead, my daughter was dead, and I wasn’t sure how my sons were going to make it.”
The vice president told the families he genuinely understands the “black hole you feel in your chest, like you’re being sucked back into it.” And, he said, while the ache never goes away, it “gets controllable.”
“Just remember two things,” he said. “Keep thinking what your husband or wife would want you to do. Keep thinking what it is, and keep remembering those kids of yours, or him or her the rest of their life, blood of my blood, bone of my bone, because, folks, it can and will get better,” he said.
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
She might be starring in Mud, but Reese Witherspoon is glowing at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s all about the baby bump.
As Witherspoon walked into the Cannes press conference on Saturday morning, she immediately took a seat. Organizers told her she might reconsider her pose.
“Oh, you want me to stand up?” Witherspoon asked, pushing herself up from the chair and causing a storm of flashbulbs.
The Cannes Film Festival was mesmerized by the Hollywood star showing off her pregnant self in a black dress for the Cannes photo call and press conference. Witherspoon’s glow was highlighted by large diamond earrings and her famous high-voltage smile.
Witherspoon, 36, is pregnant to husband Jim Toth. She has a small, gritty role in Mud, which is premiering tonight at the festival.
Writer-director Jeff Nichols said he needed someone who could be believable as the true-love of co-star Matthew McConaughey.
“I needed Reese Witherspoon,” said Nichols. “Even if her screen time is limited and, bless her heart, I kept her in a motel room most of the time, she still managed to look good. And you have this man (McConaughey) talking about her the whole time.”
“I needed someone who, when she showed up, it was like SHE’S HERE!,” he added. “She had to be believable and stand out at the same time.”
At the end of the press conference, Witherspoon stood up, reflexively held her hand over her belly and surveyed the scene.
Copyright © 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
