RED HOOK, N.Y. – The first rescuer to the scene of a fatal boat crash on New York’s Hudson River says he found a badly shaken woman, then saw four bodies in the water.

Marc Hildenbrand, fire chief in the village of Tivoli (TIH’-voh-lee), got the call about 6:30 a.m. Sunday, two hours after the 19-foot boat hit a U-shaped concrete structure on the river’s eastern shore.

Two people survived. Hildenbrand found Jessica Hotaling on the shore and saw the boat half in and half out of the water. He says that when he saw the bodies, he knew the victims were dead so he started taking care of Hotaling.

The other survivor, Joseph Vehnick, clambered up a 20-foot embankment and across two sets of railroad tracks to an open garage, where he called 911.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

In the early hours before sunrise on Sunday, Joseph J. Vehnick searched desperately for a telephone to alert authorities that the powerboat he’d been on had crashed against a concrete abutment and sank in the Hudson River.

Despite serious injuries, he made his way to a barn some distance away on the river’s eastern shore near Red Hook. From there, the 23-year-old made the 6:25 a.m. call that would lead rescuers to discover four dead boaters and an injured one, who, like Vehnick, had somehow survived.

Investigators are still trying to determine what happened in the moments before the boat crashed only 10-15 yards from the shore about 45 miles south of Albany, according to Lt. John Watterson of the Dutchess County sheriff’s office. The survivors indicated the crash occurred around 4:30 a.m.

The boat’s bow and bottom were seriously damaged, leading authorities to believe the driver had been speeding.

The body of 26-year-old John J. Uvino of Saugerties was found in the water, and it appeared he was thrown from the boat on impact, Watterson said. Divers recovered the bodies of three other boaters: Robert P. Macarthur, 27, of Kingston; Deena C. Cordero, 26, of Kingston; and Jay J. Bins, 41, of Kingston.

Vehnick, of Kingston, and 27-year-old Jessica K. Hotaling of Hyde Park, made it to shore. Both suffered multiple fractures and were being treated at area hospitals.

It wasn’t immediately clear where the 19-foot boat was coming from or headed and who was driving, Watterson said. The medical examiner was conducting autopsies Sunday to determine the victims’ cause of death, he said.

Authorities found beer bottles inside the boat and believe the occupants might have been drinking, Watterson said.

Part of the boat was still sticking out of the water when rescuers arrived. Its bow had smashed into the concrete, which may have been part of a dock or other shoreline structure there previously. It was unclear if it was marked off by a buoy, Watterson said.

The boat was pulled from the water and brought to an impound lot.

The powerboat, which has a single deck with no quarters below, is known as a bow rider because its passengers generally ride up front while the driver sits behind them.

The boat was registered to Arthur Fiore in Kingston, who couldn’t be reached for comment Sunday night.

INDIANAPOLIS – The federal government is moving to open up large swaths of coastal waters to fish farming for the first time in an effort to decrease Americans’ dependence on imports and satisfy their growing appetite for seafood.

While federal officials and fish farmers say the new push will create jobs and help allay concerns about importing seafood from countries with weak environmental regulations, conservationists worry that expanding fish farms far offshore will threaten the oceans’ health.

More than four-fifths of the fish, clams, oysters and other seafood Americans ate in 2009 was imported, according to the latest figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those imports have soared in the past decade as U.S. production lagged while other nations ramped up their sea-farming. American seafood consumption, meanwhile, grew from just over 4 billion pounds in 1999 to nearly 5 billion pounds in 2009.

To encourage domestic production, NOAA and the Commerce Department issued new policies last month intended to open up federal waters to fish and shellfish farms. Those waters start three miles offshore in most states and extend out to 200 miles. Most U.S. marine fish and shellfish farms are now in state waters close to shore, and none exist in federal waters.

Michael Rubino, who heads NOAA’s aquaculture program, said expanding the area where fish farming is allowed will boost production, create new jobs and help ease concerns that some imported seafood may be tainted with industrial wastes.

Aquaculture now accounts for half of the world’s seafood production. But in 2009, less than 2 percent of the seafood that ended up grilled, baked or fried on American tables was grown along U.S. coasts or in inland saltwater ponds.

“We’d like the U.S. to take responsibility for our consumption decisions, rather than just importing all this food,” Rubino said.

He said the new policies should help cut the nation’s seafood trade deficit, which reached $10.7 billion last year, and come as the Food and Drug Administration is urging people to eat more heart-healthy seafood.

The new policies establish a framework for allowing marine aquaculture to expand into federal waters. But before that can happen, the nation’s eight regional fish management councils must create aquaculture plans for their regions, NOAA spokeswoman Connie Barclay said. Then federal regulators will craft more specific rules for the farms, with protections for wild species and coastal and ocean ecosystems, she said.

The Gulf Coast has already started work on its management plan, and proposals are in the works to adapt unused oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf for fish-farming.

Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, supports the expansion, saying it can take years to get some state permits to start a shellfish farm. His group represents about 1,000 shellfish growers from Maine to Florida who sell about $100 million in clams, oysters and mussels a year.

The opening and leasing of federal waters would help grow the shellfish industry, which already accounts for two-thirds of U.S. marine aquaculture production, Rheault said, but he doesn’t expect the new policies to immediately lead to “huge changes.”

“This isn’t the first aquaculture plan put out by NOAA, and I’m sure it won’t be the last,” he said.

Environmental groups fear the new policies will lead to big factory-style fish farms off U.S. shores. Sebastian Troeng, vice president for marine conservation with Conservation International, said raising salmon, other fish and shrimp requires large amounts of feed made from smaller ocean fish, taking food away from declining wild fish populations. And he notes that salmon, the primary saltwater fish farmed in the U.S., can spread disease and parasites to wild fish and excrete waste that depletes ocean oxygen.

The U.S. and other countries need to pursue aquaculture in a way that “puts as little demand on the environment as possible,” Troeng said.

The new federal initiative includes a push for more research to reduce marine aquaculture’s environmental impact and expand inland production.

Advances have already opened up the potential for farms far from coastal areas, such as the saltwater shrimp operation Fowler, Ind., grain farmer Darryl Brown opened last year about 600 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. He now raises hundreds of pounds of Pacific white shrimp a month in an old barn that once held horses and cows.

A humid addition to that barn now holds six 6,600-gallon tanks filled with a swirling mix of brownish saltwater and bacteria that break down the crustaceans’ waste, allowing them to thrive.

“The little guys can really jump,” Brown said earlier this month as several shrimp vaulted from one tank as he pulled away a protective netting to scoop some up.

Brown sells the mature shrimp live for $15 a pound to restaurants, at farmers’ markets and to visitors to his farm in Fowler. So far, he said he’s sold all he’s raised.

But Brown’s farm, which NOAA says is one of only about a half-dozen of its kind nationwide, is small compared with plans in the works for offshore farms.

Zach Corrigan, acting director of Food Water Watch’s fish program, said corporate interests are pushing big aquaculture to the detriment of the environment. He said the new policies give short thrift to innovative, lower-impact aquaculture systems and focus on expanding fish-farming into federal waters.

“You’re looking at a policy that’s very much set on promoting the wrong kind of fish-farming,” he said.

__

Online:

Federal marine aquaculture policies: http://aquaculture.noaa.gov/us/aq_policies.html

RDM Shrimp: http://www.rdmshrimp.com

SAN FRANCISCO – Talking through tears, a California woman held captive for nearly two decades told of the pain and determination as she gave birth to her captor’s child in his backyard prison, while she was still just a young teenager.

“It was very painful,” Jaycee Dugard told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in an interview on “Primetime” that aired Sunday night. “She came out and then I saw her. She was beautiful. I felt like I wasn’t alone anymore. I had somebody who was mine.”

The 31-year-old woman, usually clear and composed, grew emotional when she talked about seeing the first of two girls fathered by her kidnapper, Phillip Garrido.

When Sawyer asked how old she was at the time of the birth in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Antioch she said “14″ with a small, incredulous laugh and a shake of her head.

She said she didn’t know how she could protect the child, but said “I knew I could never let anything happen to her. I didn’t know how I was going to do that, but I did.”

Dugard talked to Sawyer on a couch and on a porch at her California home. The blond hair she had in now-familiar photographs from her childhood is now reddish-brown, and she wore a red sweater and a necklace with a pinecone charm on it, representing the last thing she touched before her 18-year captivity.

The interview came on the eve of Dugard’s memoir about her time in captivity, “A Stolen Life,” which will be released Tuesday.

Dugard told Sawyer there was “a switch” she had to shut off to emotionally survive her rape and imprisonment. Asked by Sawyer how she stayed sane, Dugard said: “I don’t know. I can’t imagine being beaten to death, and you can’t imagine being kidnapped and raped. You just do what you have to do to survive.”

She described walking to the school bus stop on the day of a fifth-grade field trip and being zapped with a stun gun on a South Lake Tahoe street at age 11.

She said she heard Garrido laughing and telling his wife Nancy Garrido “I can’t believe we got away with it,” calling the moment “the most horrible moment in your life, times 10.”

Dugard said she tried to hold in her tears because of her cuffed hands.

“I tried not to cry because I couldn’t wipe them away,” she said, “and then they get itchy.”

She recalled the soundproof door of the backyard studio that Garrido shut and locked each time he left her.

“I can still hear it, consciously, when I’m awake,” Dugard said. “Some sounds and smells just don’t leave you.”

Dugard told Sawyer that in later years despite going out into public with her captors, she was just too scared to try to leave, especially for her daughters. The fear was fueled by what the Garridos told her about the world.

“What I knew was safe,” she said. “The unknown out there was terrifying, especially when thinking about the girls.”

Parole officers paid visits throughout the years to the home to check on Garrido and give him drug tests, but none reported any irregularities.

“I actually talked to one of the agents, and the agent proceeded to give Phillip his urine test and left,” Dugard said. “He made me feel like he didn’t really care.”

Phillip Garrido, 60, a serial sex offender, was given the maximum possible sentence of 431 years to life in prison last month after pleading guilty to kidnapping and 13 sexual assault charges, including rape and committing lewd acts captured on video.

His plea was part of a deal with prosecutors that saw Nancy Garrido, 55, sentenced to 36 years to life after pleading guilty to kidnapping and rape.

Without going into many details, Dugard talked about the long, drug-fueled sex sessions Garrido would put her through, and said that to her great confusion he would cry afterward.

“He would tell me what an awful man he was,” Dugard said. She said she would think that despite her own terrible pain, “I have to comfort him?”

Dugard told of her strange relationship with Nancy Garrido, who she said was “very jealous of me for some reason, like I wanted her husband to rape me, very jealous, and sick.”

Dugard said she is not full of rage, that to be angry all the time would be to let Phillip Garrido win.

But her mother, Terry Probyn, who was interviewed by Sawyer alongside her daughter, said she was.

“I think I have enough hate in my heart for the both of us,” Probyn said. “I hate that he took her life away, I hate that he stole her from me, he ripped out a piece of my heart, and he stole my baby.”

She then looked to her daughter.

“He stole your childhood, he stole your adolescence, he stole your high school proms, and pictures and memories.”

Dugard’s reply: “But he didn’t get all of me.”

___

Online:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/jaycee_dugard/jaycee-dugard-interview-diane-sawyer-future-surviving-philip/story?id14040269

HARTFORD, Conn. – On the Merritt Parkway, stately trees line the roadside, shield drivers’ eyes from the sun and offer a scenic alternative to truck-choked Interstate 95. But the trees on the historic road linking New York City and New England are not just pretty — they’re also perilous.

Trees have fallen onto cars three times in recent weeks, including one whipped by a storm June 23 onto a livery sedan driven by 74-year-old Norman Gamache, of Westport, Mass., killing him and injuring his two passengers.

“Every time this happens, I think most any of us who travel the Merritt does so holding our breath and looking upward,” said Gordon Joseloff, first selectman in Westport, Conn., where many trees have toppled onto the parkway in recent years.

For Gamache’s nephew, Bob Gendron, the question is: “What happened was one of those freaky, freaky things, I know, but why don’t they just cut back the trees?”

Along the Merritt, built in the 1930s and listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its landscaping, topography and variety of ornate overpass bridges, it’s not that simple. Preservation officials say can’t cut all trees close to the road because of historic protections.

It’s a conversation that has happened before. A couple from Pelham, N.Y., died and their two young sons were trapped in the family’s crushed car by a fallen pine tree in 2007, not far from where a large maple fell a month earlier and slightly injured another driver.

Connecticut officials reviewed potential dangers at the time and cut many questionable trees, and they said recently that their tree inspection, maintenance and removal process remains as active as ever despite budget constraints.

Still, the latest batch of falling trees and limbs has raised questions about whether more can be done to protect those who use the 37.5-mile parkway, which many car drivers favor because its low bridges make it off limits to tractor-trailers and other large commercial vehicles.

The parkway, whose first section opened in 1934, connects the Wilbur Cross Parkway in southern Connecticut to the Hutchinson River Parkway at the New York border. Towering trees border it and, in many spots, also line its narrow median. That leaves potential for trees to topple into the road during storms or even fair weather if they’re unhealthy.

As part of its Merritt maintenance work, the Connecticut Department of Transportation has workers regularly check for trees that show rot or other problems that could make them vulnerable, department spokesman Kevin Nursick said.

But the trees that recently killed Gamache and injured people in two other vehicles were healthy and gave no indication of problems, so the Transportation Department had no way of knowing they might fall, Nursick said.

“If these were dead, dying or decayed trees, I’d say we need to do better work, but these were trees that were overtly healthy,” Nursick said. “That’s the conundrum: How do we identify a healthy tree that could potentially become compromised during a weather event? I think that’s virtually impossible.”

The parkway’s historic designation prevents widespread tree removal except in emergencies. And unlike on most limited-access highways, crews cannot unilaterally cut all trees within a certain distance of the road — usually, about 30 feet — because of the Merritt’s historic protections.

The problem is exacerbated by the growing amount of traffic on the Merritt Parkway in recent decades. In 2009, the most recent figure available, it carried more than 80,000 vehicles at its busiest point, where it transforms into the Wilbur Cross.

It’s a popular alternative to nearby I-95 because trucks can’t use it, so chances are good that if a tree falls, a small vehicle will be below it.

New York officials experienced the problem in 2004, when a Yonkers couple was killed by a 50-foot ash tree that smashed into their car on a sunny day, for no obvious reason, on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester. Their infant daughter was strapped into a car seat in the back of the vehicle and survived.

The problem of trees falling into roadways isn’t limited to parkways in general or the Merritt in particular, though. In fact, the same day Gamache was killed in Stamford, a 55-year-old Guilford man was critically injured when a tree fell on his truck on U.S. 1 in Madison, about 60 miles away. He died the next day.

Motorists have also died in recent weeks in Georgia, Indiana, Virginia and California. Storms felled most of those trees.

That’s little comfort to the family of Gamache, who enjoyed long road trips, drove a big rig for decades and had a gregarious nature that made him the perfect fit to drive sedans for his nephew’s limousine company.

“My uncle was a great driver,” Gendron said. “The man never had a speeding ticket and drove tractor-trailers all of his life, in all kinds of conditions and weather.”

BILLINGS, Mont (Reuters) – Federal regulators said on Sunday they want Exxon Mobil to retool its preliminary plan to clean up oil spilled into the Yellowstone River in Montana from a ruptured pipe at the start of July.

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official, Steve Merritt, said three elements of the plan were incomplete. He said Exxon must revise how it will capture spilled oil, remove the broken pipe without causing pollution downstream, and restore the wildlife habitat and private property.

Merritt, the EPA’s on-scene coordinator for the spill, said officials wanted Exxon to finish the revisions by “one week from today”.

Exxon said it “will continue to work closely with the EPA on the draft work plan and will comply with this request,” spokesman Pius Rolheiser said in a statement.

Details of the preliminary plan will not be released until the EPA and Montana approve it. Merritt said the government had given preliminary approval to several elements of the plan, including for disposing of hazardous waste and for sampling.

Exxon is facing an EPA-ordered deadline of September 9 to clean up a river renowned for its scenic beauty, near pristine waters and wealth of wildlife and fish.

The company has apologized for the spill and pledged to restore the Yellowstone. Mop-up is under way along shorelines but high water has prevented an inspection of the pipeline and damage downriver.

Exxon estimates that 42,000 gallons of crude were released during the accident. Record flows in the Yellowstone have delayed a probe of the damaged 12-inch pipeline, which was buried in the streambed.

Federal regulators estimate the oil has traveled 240 miles downstream from the site of the rupture, west of Billings, crossing near the south-central Montana community of Laurel.

HEALTH EFFECTS

Helicopter flights along the river corridor by government and Exxon officials showed oiled riverbanks, wetlands and cropland 70 miles downstream of the spill.

Water testing by the EPA on July 4 showed no detectable levels of three known carcinogens associated with crude oil, and air monitoring revealed no major health threats so far.

Yet at least five residents have been treated in hospital emergency rooms for symptoms like dizziness, nausea and respiratory distress linked to exposure to petrochemicals, according to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

Lisa Williams, contaminants specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said that biologists were monitoring a handful of oil-tainted wildlife, including Canada geese, a white pelican and a heron.

The company has logged nearly 300 calls to its hotline, including from 100 people volunteering for clean-up efforts. Exxon is responding to roughly 100 claims stemming from property, agriculture or health concerns, a statement said.

Handling of the spill has cooled relations between the oil giant and Montana, one of just two states whose constitutions guarantee a “clean, healthful environment.”

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer has pulled the state from a panel, including Exxon and EPA, overseeing the spill response. He said its closed meetings and withholding of documents from the public violated open-government laws.

Schweitzer opened a state office in Billings to respond to any health and property concerns. A trained soil scientist, he encouraged those affected by the spill to document damage and collect water and soil samples for testing.

While some landowners have praised Exxon for picking up the tab for everything from hotel rooms to livestock feed, others have expressed frustration and worry in the absence of a detailed timeline for cleaning their oil-fouled lands.

Kelly Goodman, who lives on riverside property homesteaded by her family over a century ago, said her livelihood has been disrupted by contamination of pastures and wetlands.

Goodman’s sheep and horses have been confined to a small fenced area to prevent them from exposure to oil-stained grasses and tainted water. She said she has been unable to work the champion sheep-herding dogs she raises, shows and sells.

Goodman said she is also uneasy about wells that supply drinking water, and over the safety of crops fed by river water.

“I can’t remember the last time I ate a decent meal or had a full night’s rest,” she said. “The main thing I would like is to have everything like it was.”

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Many of the thousands who followed the Casey Anthony trial did not get the guilty verdict they wanted, nor did they learn the truth about what happened to the 2-year-old daughter she was accused of murdering.

And for the public, that may be one of the most frustrating parts of the case: Despite all the speculation and theories, they will never know how or why Caylee Anthony died.

“I think we know as much as we ever will know,” said Beth Hough, a 27-year-old administrative assistant from Chicago who followed the trial. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but if we did, it would help people to finally just move on and to end the story.”

That’s what’s missing: an ending. And because we’re so used to neatly packaged, hour-long TV crime dramas where the bad guy is usually put behind bars, the fact Anthony could be convicted only of lying to police has left people unsatisfied. And they have been vocal about their dismay, turning to Twitter and Facebook to vent their frustration.

So what’s left? Some fuzzy defense claims that little Caylee drowned and that her grandfather tried to make an accident look like a homicide.

“One of the quite healthy and appropriate satisfactions we get out of a well-functioning justice system is the belief that the justice system will give us the best answers to questions,” said Doug Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University.

A little girl ended up dead in the woods near her grandparents’ home with duct tape over her mouth, and her mother didn’t report her disappearance for more than a month. But how did Caylee die?

That’s where it gets complicated.

The defense said Caylee drowned in the family’s swimming pool. Prosecutors couldn’t say how Caylee died because the girl’s body was too decomposed to harvest DNA or other forensic evidence. So the state relied on circumstantial evidence: the trunk of Casey’s car smelled like a dead body to some witnesses; someone did an internet search for chloroform — a chemical that can be used to knock someone unconscious — at the Anthony home; and there was duct tape on Caylee’s skull when it was found six months after she was last seen in June 2008.

“If we don’t know how Caylee died, we can’t assign responsibility for the factors that led to her death. So there’s no justice,” said Maryann Gajos, a 51-year-old mother of two and a sixth-grade reading teacher in Inverness, Fla. “Watching all of these crime shows has spoiled all of us. In TV shows, the coroner always has the answer.”

But in this case, the coroner didn’t have the answer. Dr. Jan Garavaglia told the jury that Caylee had been murdered, but she couldn’t establish exactly how she died from only a skeleton.

And in the life-imitates-TV irony of this case, Garavaglia is also the star of her own reality TV show on Discovery Health Channel called “Dr. G: Medical Examiner,” in which she solves cases through autopsies.

“It’s frustrating that they can’t come up for a definitive reason for this girl dying,” said Sherri Cohen, a self-employed photographer from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “Archaeologists can tell you about bones that were found thousands of years ago, but they can’t tell you how a 3-year-old girl died three years ago.”

How Casey Anthony acted in the weeks and months after Caylee’s disappearance also contribute to the perception of whether the jury ultimately delivered justice.

“I feel that the way Casey Anthony behaved during the month her baby was `missing’ and her lies to the police and others have really frustrated people who want to see justice served,” said Marjorie Stout of Pinellas County, Fla., the same area where the jury was chosen because of the intense publicity in the Orlando area. “Not just for what is perceived to be murdering one’s own child but her lack of concern for Caylee as well.”

Berman, the Ohio State professor, has another theory about why folks are so frustrated: Casey Anthony never spoke. The defense made a strategic decision for Anthony not to testify — a decision that clearly worked in her favor, he said.

“It’s not just that the jury decision came out differently than we had hoped, it’s that the jury decision wasn’t a statement of her innocence. It was a statement of `We can’t figure out what happened.’ And in some sense, that’s even more frustrating than if the jury said, `We don’t think she did it.’”

That’s only amplified by the circumstances surrounding the case. After all, plenty of people are acquitted at trial because there isn’t enough evidence, said Jennifer Zedalis, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. But, she said, “there aren’t a lot of cases where that happens where the victim is a 2-year-old and the mother was out partying when her daughter was missing or dead.”

NEWARK, N.J. – An FBI spokesman said Monday that it does not appear a stun gun found aboard a JetBlue plane that landed late Friday in Newark was intended to be used in an attack.

Bryan Travers, a spokesman for the FBI’s Newark office, said information from the investigation so far suggests that no attack was imminent. He would not detail why investigators think that.

The stun gun was found by a crew that was cleaning Flight 1179 from Boston around 10:20 p.m. Friday, after the flight had landed and all 96 passengers were off the plane.

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police removed the stun gun from the plane and handed it over to the federal Transportation Security Administration, which is responsible for screening passengers.

The investigation, being led by the FBI’s office in Boston, is focusing on how the stun gun got onto the plane, Travers said.

“People get caught bring stuff to the checkpoint all the time,” he said.

Travers said that by Monday morning it was not clear who may have brought the gun aboard.

Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman said there were no indications the stun gun was fired.

JetBlue spokesman Sebastian White said the plane’s next flight was slightly delayed.

ATLANTA – One of the nation’s toughest crackdowns on human trafficking has taken effect in Georgia, striking a delicate balance between tougher penalties for criminals and more treatment for victims that advocates said could be a model for other states seeking to fight the sex trade.

The legislation took effect this month after a four-year legislative fight, overhauling the way Georgia treats people forced into prostitution. It bars prosecutors from charging people with sex crimes if the offense occurred while the person was a victim of trafficking. It also tacks on tough new criminal penalties for human traffickers.

The dual approach helped appease both religious conservatives, who argued the changes could effectively legalize prostitution, and children’s advocates, who said a safety valve was needed for victims who were forced into the sex trade.

“This is America’s dirty little secret, these are crimes the public doesn’t see, that the public doesn’t want to believe exist; these are hidden victims,” said Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who praised Georgia’s new crackdown.

“Historically, what law enforcement has tended to do is to arrest the kid,” he said. “We are trying to ensure that they focus on the pimp and the customer.”

The legislation calls for a 25-year minimum sentence for those convicted of using coercion to traffic someone under the age of 18, and slaps a minimum sentence of five years on those who pay for sex with a 16-year-old. People trying to have sex with someone even younger face at least 10 years behind bars.

The measure includes protections that allow a prostituted child or adult to avoid criminal charges if they can prove they were coerced into it. Under the measure, coercion doesn’t mean just physical abuse but also financial harm, destruction of immigration documents and drug use.

And the bill allows victims to be eligible for state money for medical treatment — as long as they cooperate with law enforcement.

The stiffer criminal penalties were added to earn the votes of tough-on-crime conservatives, who helped defeat a similar measure last year amid fears that the language would unwittingly end up legalizing prostitution for children under 16.

State Sen. Renee Unterman, the Georgia Republican who sponsored the bill, said it will help protect homeless children who get lured into the sex trade. And Attorney General Sam Olens, who made the legislation one of his top priorities, said it gives prosecutors several much-needed tools to fight prostitution.

“This new law will protect some of the most vulnerable members of our society and deter those bad actors who prey on them,” Olens said.

Among the activists who helped sway lawmakers to adopt the stricter penalties is Keisha Head, who was lured into prostitution at the age of 16 after she ran away from home. She worked for a pimp for years, suffering rapes, abuse and an attempted kidnapping. Each time she tried to get out of her situation, the pimp threatened to harm her and her daughter.

“I became numb to what I was doing,” she said. “I guess that is the survival instinct to become numb when inflicted with such an ordeal.”

The Associated Press does not generally identify victims of sexual assault, but Head has agreed to let her name be used to illustrate the dangers of child prostitution.

The new restrictions are a strong first step, Head said, but the work in Georgia is far from over.

“They need to turn up the heat,” she said, “and start convicting the predators or the pimps who are exploiting the children.”

___

Associated Press videojournalist Marina Hutchinson contributed to this report.

ELK GROVE, Calif. – Kamaljit Atwal’s neighborhood seems like an unlikely place for a hate crime. His street in this Sacramento suburb seems a model of diversity.

Atwal and his family are one of two Sikh families on the block from India. On Atwal’s street alone, there’s a Vietnamese family, a Mexican family, a black woman and a white man.

But in March, Atwal’s 78-year-old father Gurmej Atwal and his 67-year-old friend Surinder Singh were shot and killed while taking an afternoon stroll in the neighborhood.

Atwal and his fellow Sikhs in the area wonder if the same ugliness that has brought violence to other Sikhs is the reason why.

The men had long beards and were wearing turbans, both traditional symbols of their religion. Police are investigating whether their killing was a hate crime.

“It’s a complete case of mistaken identity,” said Rajdeep Singh of the Washington, D.C.-based Sikh Coalition, which is the largest Sikh civil rights group in the U.S. “When people look at me with a turban and beard, the first thing that comes to mind is, `That guy looks like Osama bin Laden.’ “

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Sikhs have reported a rise in bias attacks, both verbal and physical, against them. The backlash that hit Muslims across the country has expanded to include them and their faith as well, with some assuming the sight of a long beard and turbaned head can only mean one thing.

Kamajit Atwal said life used to be peaceful for him, his wife and their three children since moving to his quiet suburban block in 2003. Crime has gone down for four years in a row, in Elk Grove, where about 54 percent of its 153,000 residents are nonwhite.

Atwal keeps a framed photo of his father on the fireplace mantel, not far from where the retired Indian civil servant once enjoyed his tea. Almost every day, Gurmej Atwal and his friend drank tea together, took a walk and met with other Sikh retirees in a nearby park.

“My gut is that it was a hate crime,” said Atwal. He said that other elderly Sikhs are so afraid of being out in public since the shootings that they no longer socialize in the park.

Mayor Steve Detrick said he’s not convinced the double shooting is a hate crime because the area has a history of accepting others.

“Elk Grove is probably one of the most accepting about racial and religious diversity in the country,” he said. “I think somebody looked at these guys as an easy target. They were gunned down by cowards.”

Amar Shergill, a Sikh and Sacramento attorney who lives in Elk Grove, said the problem is not Elk Grove’s. When people — including some politicians — try to stigmatize all Muslims as anti-American, Shergill said, all people who look different are targeted unfairly.

“When the process becomes radicalized, that’s when the disturbed actors take out on Sikhs and Muslims and people who are perceived to be Muslims,” he said.

Singh said there’s just not enough awareness of Sikhism, which is 500 years old and is the world’s fifth largest religion with 18 million adherents. The faith, which originated in the Indian region of Punjab, draws from Hinduism and Islamic Sufism and the faithful believe in karmic cycles of rebirth, similar to Buddhists.

Prior to 2001, Sikhs say, people were merely curious about the turbans and why adherents don’t cut their hair. After Sept. 11, some people felt that Sikhs were the enemy.

The Sikh Coalition said there have been at least 700 attacks or bias-related incidents against Sikhs since Sept. 11 in the U.S. Hate crimes against Sikhs are lumped in with hate crimes against Muslims, Arabs and South Asians — all groups that have experienced increased discrimination since the attacks of 2001.

The group will hold meetings in New York on July 30 and in San Francisco on Aug. 27 so Sikhs can talk about bias and discrimination in the last decade. Videos of the meetings will be sent to lawmakers and police agencies. The coalition is also spearheading an effort this summer to stop bullying of Sikh children in schools after kids reported that other students tried to forcibly cut their hair, set their turbans on fire or attack them.

“Suddenly, our life has changed,” said Rana Singh Sodhi, the brother of a man who was murdered outside of his Arizona gas station five days after Sept. 11. “We didn’t have any issue before 9/11.”

Sodhi said that he and his family have stopped going camping in isolated areas because they fear what will happen.

The man who was convicted of killing Sodhi’s brother expressed anger over Sept. 11 and before the murder, had told his wife that “all Arabs should be shot.”

In 2004, vandals scrawled the words “It’s not your country” in blue spray paint on the wall of a Sikh temple in Fresno. No one has been arrested in that case.

In 2010, a Sikh cabdriver was beaten by two men in Sacramento — located in a region with more Sikh residents than any in the nation. During the attack, one of the men called the cabbie “Osama bin Laden,” and also repeatedly told the assailants that he wasn’t Muslim, authorities said. In early June, Pedro Ramirez was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the attack a second man was sentenced to a year in jail.

On Memorial Day of this year, four weeks after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a Sikh man who is a subway employee in New York said he was punched in the mouth by a man who called him “the brother of Osama.”

No one has been arrested.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Tamara Lush is traveling the country writing about the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamaralush.

ELK GROVE, Calif. – Kamaljit Atwal’s neighborhood seems like an unlikely place for a hate crime. His street in this Sacramento suburb seems a model of diversity.

Atwal and his family are one of two Sikh families on the block from India. On Atwal’s street alone, there’s a Vietnamese family, a Mexican family, a black woman and a white man.

But in March, Atwal’s 78-year-old father Gurmej Atwal and his 67-year-old friend Surinder Singh were shot and killed while taking an afternoon stroll in the neighborhood.

Atwal and his fellow Sikhs in the area wonder if the same ugliness that has brought violence to other Sikhs is the reason why.

The men had long beards and were wearing turbans, both traditional symbols of their religion. Police are investigating whether their killing was a hate crime.

“It’s a complete case of mistaken identity,” said Rajdeep Singh of the Washington, D.C.-based Sikh Coalition, which is the largest Sikh civil rights group in the U.S. “When people look at me with a turban and beard, the first thing that comes to mind is, `That guy looks like Osama bin Laden.’ “

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Sikhs have reported a rise in bias attacks, both verbal and physical, against them. The backlash that hit Muslims across the country has expanded to include them and their faith as well, with some assuming the sight of a long beard and turbaned head can only mean one thing.

Kamajit Atwal said life used to be peaceful for him, his wife and their three children since moving to his quiet suburban block in 2003. Crime has gone down for four years in a row, in Elk Grove, where about 54 percent of its 153,000 residents are nonwhite.

Atwal keeps a framed photo of his father on the fireplace mantel, not far from where the retired Indian civil servant once enjoyed his tea. Almost every day, Gurmej Atwal and his friend drank tea together, took a walk and met with other Sikh retirees in a nearby park.

“My gut is that it was a hate crime,” said Atwal. He said that other elderly Sikhs are so afraid of being out in public since the shootings that they no longer socialize in the park.

Mayor Steve Detrick said he’s not convinced the double shooting is a hate crime because the area has a history of accepting others.

“Elk Grove is probably one of the most accepting about racial and religious diversity in the country,” he said. “I think somebody looked at these guys as an easy target. They were gunned down by cowards.”

Amar Shergill, a Sikh and Sacramento attorney who lives in Elk Grove, said the problem is not Elk Grove’s. When people — including some politicians — try to stigmatize all Muslims as anti-American, Shergill said, all people who look different are targeted unfairly.

“When the process becomes radicalized, that’s when the disturbed actors take out on Sikhs and Muslims and people who are perceived to be Muslims,” he said.

Singh said there’s just not enough awareness of Sikhism, which is 500 years old and is the world’s fifth largest religion with 18 million adherents. The faith, which originated in the Indian region of Punjab, draws from Hinduism and Islamic Sufism and the faithful believe in karmic cycles of rebirth, similar to Buddhists.

Prior to 2001, Sikhs say, people were merely curious about the turbans and why adherents don’t cut their hair. After Sept. 11, some people felt that Sikhs were the enemy.

The Sikh Coalition said there have been at least 700 attacks or bias-related incidents against Sikhs since Sept. 11 in the U.S. Hate crimes against Sikhs are lumped in with hate crimes against Muslims, Arabs and South Asians — all groups that have experienced increased discrimination since the attacks of 2001.

The group will hold meetings in New York on July 30 and in San Francisco on Aug. 27 so Sikhs can talk about bias and discrimination in the last decade. Videos of the meetings will be sent to lawmakers and police agencies. The coalition is also spearheading an effort this summer to stop bullying of Sikh children in schools after kids reported that other students tried to forcibly cut their hair, set their turbans on fire or attack them.

“Suddenly, our life has changed,” said Rana Singh Sodhi, the brother of a man who was murdered outside of his Arizona gas station five days after Sept. 11. “We didn’t have any issue before 9/11.”

Sodhi said that he and his family have stopped going camping in isolated areas because they fear what will happen.

The man who was convicted of killing Sodhi’s brother expressed anger over Sept. 11 and before the murder, had told his wife that “all Arabs should be shot.”

In 2004, vandals scrawled the words “It’s not your country” in blue spray paint on the wall of a Sikh temple in Fresno. No one has been arrested in that case.

In 2010, a Sikh cabdriver was beaten by two men in Sacramento — located in a region with more Sikh residents than any in the nation. During the attack, one of the men called the cabbie “Osama bin Laden,” and also repeatedly told the assailants that he wasn’t Muslim, authorities said. In early June, Pedro Ramirez was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the attack a second man was sentenced to a year in jail.

On Memorial Day of this year, four weeks after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a Sikh man who is a subway employee in New York said he was punched in the mouth by a man who called him “the brother of Osama.”

No one has been arrested.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Tamara Lush is traveling the country writing about the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamaralush.

ORLANDO, Fla. – One of Casey Anthony’s defense lawyers says he’s worried about her safety once she’s released from jail after being acquitted of murdering her 2-year-old daughter.

Cheney Mason told the NBC’s “Today” show Monday he doesn’t know where Anthony will go when she’s freed Sunday from a Florida jail. He said she would need time and counseling to re-enter society after being jailed for nearly three years before and during her high-profile trial. She was convicted of four counts of lying to law enforcement.

Mason said Anthony’s relations with her parents were “pretty well burned” after the trial, where her defense team contended she was sexually abused by her father. Her father, George Anthony, denied the claims.

Jail records show Casey Anthony refused a visit Friday from her mother, Cindy Anthony.

ORLANDO, Fla. – One of Casey Anthony’s defense lawyers says he’s worried about her safety once she’s released from jail after being acquitted of murdering her 2-year-old daughter.

Cheney Mason told the NBC’s “Today” show Monday he doesn’t know where Anthony will go when she’s freed Sunday from a Florida jail. He said she would need time and counseling to re-enter society after being jailed for nearly three years before and during her high-profile trial. She was convicted of four counts of lying to law enforcement.

Mason said Anthony’s relations with her parents were “pretty well burned” after the trial, where her defense team contended she was sexually abused by her father. Her father, George Anthony, denied the claims.

Jail records show Casey Anthony refused a visit Friday from her mother, Cindy Anthony.

DEMOPOLIS, Ala. – A family of seven was killed when their small plane crashed in western Alabama as they were returning from a family reunion.

The couple and their five children were flying back to Florida from St. Louis when the crash happened Saturday night, Marengo County Coroner Stuart Eatmon said.

They tried landing the Cessna C421 at an airport in Demopolis after it lost its right engine, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Holly Baker said in an email. The plane crashed in a densely wooded area near the airport.

Eatmon identified the dead as: Fred Teutenberg, 42; his wife, Terresa, who was in her mid-30s; their daughter Emma, 2; their son Peyton, 4; their daughter Ellie, 6; their son Brendon, 9; and their son Will, 10. They are from the Destin, Fla., area.

Terresa Teutenberg’s oldest child, Ashlei Bruewer, 16, was not on the plane, Eatmon said.

The coroner said relatives told him the family was flying back Saturday so they could make it to church the next day.

The plane was found upside-down and a wing had broken off, apparently as it crashed into trees, Eatmon said. Searchers located it early Sunday.

FAA records show the plane was built in 1978. It was registered to Advanced Integrated Technology Solutions LLC in Niceville, Fla., Fred Teutenberg’s company. A message left seeking comment from the company wasn’t immediately returned.

Terresa Teutenberg owned Discovery Learning Academy in Bluewater Bay.

“She was an excellent leader and role model. Her work within the school and the community will be greatly missed,” the academy said in a statement issued Sunday.

Friends told The Northwest Florida Daily News that Fred Teutenberg did volunteer work and played bass guitar every Sunday with the church band at First United Methodist Church of Niceville.

“He not only played with our band, he played with other church bands elsewhere,” said Bob Webb, a friend and member of the church. “He told me one time he even toured a while. So he had a lot of interests.”

Eatmon spoke to Fred Teutenberg’s father after the crash. Fred Sr. said he had been telling his son to buy a newer plane if he was going to fly with his family, Eatmon said.

“He told his dad the plane had two new engines,” Eatmon said.

DEMOPOLIS, Ala. – A family of seven was killed when their small plane crashed in western Alabama as they were returning from a family reunion.

The couple and their five children were flying back to Florida from St. Louis when the crash happened Saturday night, Marengo County Coroner Stuart Eatmon said.

They tried landing the Cessna C421 at an airport in Demopolis after it lost its right engine, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Holly Baker said in an email. The plane crashed in a densely wooded area near the airport.

Eatmon identified the dead as: Fred Teutenberg, 42; his wife, Terresa, who was in her mid-30s; their daughter Emma, 2; their son Peyton, 4; their daughter Ellie, 6; their son Brendon, 9; and their son Will, 10. They are from the Destin, Fla., area.

Terresa Teutenberg’s oldest child, Ashlei Bruewer, 16, was not on the plane, Eatmon said.

The coroner said relatives told him the family was flying back Saturday so they could make it to church the next day.

The plane was found upside-down and a wing had broken off, apparently as it crashed into trees, Eatmon said. Searchers located it early Sunday.

FAA records show the plane was built in 1978. It was registered to Advanced Integrated Technology Solutions LLC in Niceville, Fla., Fred Teutenberg’s company. A message left seeking comment from the company wasn’t immediately returned.

Terresa Teutenberg owned Discovery Learning Academy in Bluewater Bay.

“She was an excellent leader and role model. Her work within the school and the community will be greatly missed,” the academy said in a statement issued Sunday.

Friends told The Northwest Florida Daily News that Fred Teutenberg did volunteer work and played bass guitar every Sunday with the church band at First United Methodist Church of Niceville.

“He not only played with our band, he played with other church bands elsewhere,” said Bob Webb, a friend and member of the church. “He told me one time he even toured a while. So he had a lot of interests.”

Eatmon spoke to Fred Teutenberg’s father after the crash. Fred Sr. said he had been telling his son to buy a newer plane if he was going to fly with his family, Eatmon said.

“He told his dad the plane had two new engines,” Eatmon said.

NORTH PORT, Fla. – High school principal George Kenney acknowledged using hypnosis to help people: students who needed to relax before tests, a basketball player having trouble making free throws and even school secretaries who wanted to quit smoking.

But now the popular 51-year-old principal’s future at North Port High School is in question since it came to light that he had hypnotized two students before their separate suicides this spring. There is no indication their deaths were any more than a tragic coincidence. However, Kenney acknowledged conducting the sessions after being warned by his boss to stop such one-on-one hypnosis with students at school.

Most students, teachers and fellow administrators at the southwest Florida school were aware that Kenney was a trained hypnotist who would eagerly help those who sought him out for sessions, according to a school district report. Students looked forward to his demonstrations in a psychology class and at other school events.

In April, according to the Sarasota County School District report, he hypnotized a 16-year-old student to help him better focus on a test. The next day, the boy committed suicide. Kenney was put on leave in May when the boy’s parents, who had given their permission for the sessions, raised concerns after his death.

The administrator’s situation then got stickier when an investigation showed that he had also hypnotized another student five months before her May 4 suicide, initially lied about it and had defied three separate verbal warnings to stop the sessions with students.

A 134-page independent investigative report released by the district last week includes an interview with Kenney, who acknowledged defying the orders and then lying.

“I’m not saying I used great judgment all the time here,” he told an investigator. “I think I used poor judgment several times.”

But the report also reflects the support and affection Kenney enjoys at the 2,300-student high school, about 90 miles south of Tampa. Two Facebook pages, one with more than 1,600 fans, have been created to support Kenney, principal of North Port High since its opening in 2001. Some students who were hypnotized say it helped them with sports and academics.

Many students and staff credit him with guiding the school through a time of grief. In March, before the two suicides, a 16-year-old football player was killed in a car crash, which followed the traffic death of a teacher killed driving to school in November.

Kenney is the “glue that just holds the school together,” said his administrative assistant, Dianna McLaren.

Kenney declined to comment through his attorney, Mark Zimmerman, who said there is no “causal connection” between the hypnosis sessions and the suicides. Both students had sought Kenney’s help with test anxiety and had signed permission slips from their parents, Zimmerman said. In the case of student Brittany Palumbo, her mother was present during the session.

“It sort of conjures up a feeling of mind control, which of course is not what hypnosis is,” Zimmerman said. “This was hypnosis as a relaxation and focus technique to aid in test and athletic performance.”

Zimmerman said Kenney initially misspoke when he told an administrator that he had not had a session with Palumbo, and never intended to hide it.

Kenney was more than a hobbyist when it came to hypnosis. He wrote four books about using hypnosis in defeating test anxiety and mastering baseball and basketball skills. He trained at a Florida hypnosis center and was a member of the National Guild of Hypnotists and the National Board of Hypnosis Education and Certification. He told investigators he has worked with around 36 students — with parental permission — in the past couple years, mostly on test anxiety, athletic performance and anger management. He also worked with several of the school’s sports teams, staff members and their families.

“Dr. Kenney isn’t doing any hocus-pocus,” Ann Brandenberger, a psychology teacher at the high school, told an investigator. “That is just what this has been blown into.”

According to the report, Kenney would have people close their eyes and visualize something serene as he talked them into a state of “deep relaxation,” then would suggest to them that they will feel calm and focused before a test, sporting event or other activity.

Gerald Kein, director of the National Board of Hypnosis Education and Certification, described hypnosis as “bypassing the critical factor of the conscious mind,” creating an “open-mindedness” to new ideas.

Kein said that to his knowledge Kenney didn’t violate any of the board’s rules about treating children. Rules call for written permission from parents and urge parental involvement in the sessions. Kein said a hypnotist shouldn’t work with anyone who clearly needs help from a licensed medical professional. Kenney said he had no indication that either student who later committed suicide was suffering from mental illness.

“I think the whole thing is ludicrous. I think it’s ridiculous,” said Kein, who is also director of the Omni Hypnosis Training Center in DeLand, Fla., one of the places where Kenney trained. “From what I understand, he just worked on motivation with these young people, motivation and test anxiety and allowing them to be the very best they can.”

School district spokesman Gary Leatherman said school officials will wait to see whether the North Port police decide to prosecute Kenney under a decades-old state law that requires a doctor’s reference for hypnosis as therapy. After that, the district superintendent will decide what, if any, punishment he should receive.

Kenney’s attorney said he’s working in the school district offices pending the outcome of the investigation and looks forward to getting back to his post at the high school.

NORTH PORT, Fla. – High school principal George Kenney acknowledged using hypnosis to help people: students who needed to relax before tests, a basketball player having trouble making free throws and even school secretaries who wanted to quit smoking.

But now the popular 51-year-old principal’s future at North Port High School is in question since it came to light that he had hypnotized two students before their separate suicides this spring. There is no indication their deaths were any more than a tragic coincidence. However, Kenney acknowledged conducting the sessions after being warned by his boss to stop such one-on-one hypnosis with students at school.

Most students, teachers and fellow administrators at the southwest Florida school were aware that Kenney was a trained hypnotist who would eagerly help those who sought him out for sessions, according to a school district report. Students looked forward to his demonstrations in a psychology class and at other school events.

In April, according to the Sarasota County School District report, he hypnotized a 16-year-old student to help him better focus on a test. The next day, the boy committed suicide. Kenney was put on leave in May when the boy’s parents, who had given their permission for the sessions, raised concerns after his death.

The administrator’s situation then got stickier when an investigation showed that he had also hypnotized another student five months before her May 4 suicide, initially lied about it and had defied three separate verbal warnings to stop the sessions with students.

A 134-page independent investigative report released by the district last week includes an interview with Kenney, who acknowledged defying the orders and then lying.

“I’m not saying I used great judgment all the time here,” he told an investigator. “I think I used poor judgment several times.”

But the report also reflects the support and affection Kenney enjoys at the 2,300-student high school, about 90 miles south of Tampa. Two Facebook pages, one with more than 1,600 fans, have been created to support Kenney, principal of North Port High since its opening in 2001. Some students who were hypnotized say it helped them with sports and academics.

Many students and staff credit him with guiding the school through a time of grief. In March, before the two suicides, a 16-year-old football player was killed in a car crash, which followed the traffic death of a teacher killed driving to school in November.

Kenney is the “glue that just holds the school together,” said his administrative assistant, Dianna McLaren.

Kenney declined to comment through his attorney, Mark Zimmerman, who said there is no “causal connection” between the hypnosis sessions and the suicides. Both students had sought Kenney’s help with test anxiety and had signed permission slips from their parents, Zimmerman said. In the case of student Brittany Palumbo, her mother was present during the session.

“It sort of conjures up a feeling of mind control, which of course is not what hypnosis is,” Zimmerman said. “This was hypnosis as a relaxation and focus technique to aid in test and athletic performance.”

Zimmerman said Kenney initially misspoke when he told an administrator that he had not had a session with Palumbo, and never intended to hide it.

Kenney was more than a hobbyist when it came to hypnosis. He wrote four books about using hypnosis in defeating test anxiety and mastering baseball and basketball skills. He trained at a Florida hypnosis center and was a member of the National Guild of Hypnotists and the National Board of Hypnosis Education and Certification. He told investigators he has worked with around 36 students — with parental permission — in the past couple years, mostly on test anxiety, athletic performance and anger management. He also worked with several of the school’s sports teams, staff members and their families.

“Dr. Kenney isn’t doing any hocus-pocus,” Ann Brandenberger, a psychology teacher at the high school, told an investigator. “That is just what this has been blown into.”

According to the report, Kenney would have people close their eyes and visualize something serene as he talked them into a state of “deep relaxation,” then would suggest to them that they will feel calm and focused before a test, sporting event or other activity.

Gerald Kein, director of the National Board of Hypnosis Education and Certification, described hypnosis as “bypassing the critical factor of the conscious mind,” creating an “open-mindedness” to new ideas.

Kein said that to his knowledge Kenney didn’t violate any of the board’s rules about treating children. Rules call for written permission from parents and urge parental involvement in the sessions. Kein said a hypnotist shouldn’t work with anyone who clearly needs help from a licensed medical professional. Kenney said he had no indication that either student who later committed suicide was suffering from mental illness.

“I think the whole thing is ludicrous. I think it’s ridiculous,” said Kein, who is also director of the Omni Hypnosis Training Center in DeLand, Fla., one of the places where Kenney trained. “From what I understand, he just worked on motivation with these young people, motivation and test anxiety and allowing them to be the very best they can.”

School district spokesman Gary Leatherman said school officials will wait to see whether the North Port police decide to prosecute Kenney under a decades-old state law that requires a doctor’s reference for hypnosis as therapy. After that, the district superintendent will decide what, if any, punishment he should receive.

Kenney’s attorney said he’s working in the school district offices pending the outcome of the investigation and looks forward to getting back to his post at the high school.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The Illinois Supreme Court on Monday approved the state’s appeal of a lower court ruling that had voided taxes and other revenue earmarked to pay off bonds for a massive capital improvement program.

The state high court reversed a lower appeals court ruling decided in January. Illinois had argued the ruling would cost the state millions of dollars in revenue and would force it to find alternative sources for paying off bonds already sold for its $31 billion capital improvement program.

(Editing by James Dalgleish)

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The Illinois Supreme Court on Monday approved the state’s appeal of a lower court ruling that had voided taxes and other revenue earmarked to pay off bonds for a massive capital improvement program.

The state high court reversed a lower appeals court ruling decided in January. Illinois had argued the ruling would cost the state millions of dollars in revenue and would force it to find alternative sources for paying off bonds already sold for its $31 billion capital improvement program.

(Editing by James Dalgleish)

Jaycee Dugard has spent 18 of the 31 years of her life held in captivity. Kidnapped while walking to school as an 11 year old and freed two years ago, Dugard is now ready to share her story with the world.

Her first televised interview, with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, will air this Sunday night at 9 p.m.. “Now I can walk in the room and see my mom,” ABC reports that Dugard told Sawyer. “Wow. I can decide to jump in the car and go to the beach with the girls.”

Dugard now lives with her mother, Terry Probyn, and two daughters, whom she gave birth to in the backyard of her kidnappers, Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Officers apparently paid 60 visits to the Garrido household while Dugard was being held captive without finding her. She was finally discovered after Philip Garrido took Dugard’s two daughters to the UC Berkeley campus to hand out religious pamphlets, drawing the attention of police officers. A background check confirmed Garrido as a registered sex offender, and he later arrived, with Dugard and her two children, at a meeting with his parole officer.

(LIST: Top 10 Famous Disappearances)

In June, Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years in prison. Nancy Garrido will serve 36 years to life in jail. Today, Dugard, who initially protected Garrido after he was caught, wears the symbol of a pinecone around her neck as a testament to her new life. Shortly after she was freed, she started asking people to bring her pinecones, later realizing that a pinecone was the last thing she touched after being shot by Garrido with a stun gun on that fateful day in 1991.

“She looks with unflinching clarity at what was done to her. The handcuffs, the sexual abuse—she talks about it, she tells about it,” Sawyer told Good Morning America about the interview. “But at the end of the day she says, ‘He’s not going to own me. I will stare it down and I will not be afraid.’”

Sunday’s television program will also include the first broadcast of the victim’s statement that Probyn read at the Garrido sentencing. The interview moreover comes just prior to the release of Dugard’s memoir, A Stolen Life, on July 12. The memoir is excerpted, alongside never-before-seen photos, in this week’s People magazine.

LIST: Top 10 Heroes of 2009

Jaycee Dugard has spent 18 of the 31 years of her life held in captivity. Kidnapped while walking to school as an 11 year old and freed two years ago, Dugard is now ready to share her story with the world.

Her first televised interview, with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, will air this Sunday night at 9 p.m.. “Now I can walk in the room and see my mom,” ABC reports that Dugard told Sawyer. “Wow. I can decide to jump in the car and go to the beach with the girls.”

Dugard now lives with her mother, Terry Probyn, and two daughters, whom she gave birth to in the backyard of her kidnappers, Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Officers apparently paid 60 visits to the Garrido household while Dugard was being held captive without finding her. She was finally discovered after Philip Garrido took Dugard’s two daughters to the UC Berkeley campus to hand out religious pamphlets, drawing the attention of police officers. A background check confirmed Garrido as a registered sex offender, and he later arrived, with Dugard and her two children, at a meeting with his parole officer.

(LIST: Top 10 Famous Disappearances)

In June, Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years in prison. Nancy Garrido will serve 36 years to life in jail. Today, Dugard, who initially protected Garrido after he was caught, wears the symbol of a pinecone around her neck as a testament to her new life. Shortly after she was freed, she started asking people to bring her pinecones, later realizing that a pinecone was the last thing she touched after being shot by Garrido with a stun gun on that fateful day in 1991.

“She looks with unflinching clarity at what was done to her. The handcuffs, the sexual abuse—she talks about it, she tells about it,” Sawyer told Good Morning America about the interview. “But at the end of the day she says, ‘He’s not going to own me. I will stare it down and I will not be afraid.’”

Sunday’s television program will also include the first broadcast of the victim’s statement that Probyn read at the Garrido sentencing. The interview moreover comes just prior to the release of Dugard’s memoir, A Stolen Life, on July 12. The memoir is excerpted, alongside never-before-seen photos, in this week’s People magazine.

LIST: Top 10 Heroes of 2009

Job seeker Jeffery Sizemore (C) picks up fliers from potential employers during the Los Angeles Mission’s 10th annual Skid Row Career Fair June 2, 2011 in Los Angeles, California.

The Great Recession hit men especially hard. But in the long, shaky recovery, they’re now outpacing women in finding employment. That’s surprising because in past recoveries, women have tended to get re-employed faster than men — making this another of the many ways in which this recovery is different.

According to a new Pew Research Center survey, men gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5% from June 2009 to May 2011. But women actually lost 218,000 jobs during the same period and increased their unemployment rate by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5%.

(MORE: Want to Make More Than a Banker? Become a Farmer!)

But not only are men outpacing women in finding jobs; they’re doing it in sectors that are historically female-dominated. According to Pew, employment trends have favored men in all but one of the 16 major sectors of the economy, including retail trade, education and health services.

In four of the six major recoveries since 1970, women have bounced back better than men. So what’s different this time? One factor appears to be simply that large numbers of men lost jobs in the recession — thus more men are looking for work and more are getting hired. It also appears that men have become more flexible about the kinds of jobs they’re willing to take. Men who were in more male-centered jobs like construction and manufacturing (which were really hurt by the recession) and who might never have considered working in something like retail or health care seem to be more willing than before.

(MORE: In Many Cities, Jobs Recovery Could be a Decade Away)

But as the recovery (hopefully) intensifies — some good news came today, with 157,000 private sector jobs reportedly added in June — we’ll start to unravel more about this strange, long road to recovery. In the meantime, women can take solace in the fact they’re better at almost everything than men.

Job seeker Jeffery Sizemore (C) picks up fliers from potential employers during the Los Angeles Mission’s 10th annual Skid Row Career Fair June 2, 2011 in Los Angeles, California.

The Great Recession hit men especially hard. But in the long, shaky recovery, they’re now outpacing women in finding employment. That’s surprising because in past recoveries, women have tended to get re-employed faster than men — making this another of the many ways in which this recovery is different.

According to a new Pew Research Center survey, men gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5% from June 2009 to May 2011. But women actually lost 218,000 jobs during the same period and increased their unemployment rate by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5%.

(MORE: Want to Make More Than a Banker? Become a Farmer!)

But not only are men outpacing women in finding jobs; they’re doing it in sectors that are historically female-dominated. According to Pew, employment trends have favored men in all but one of the 16 major sectors of the economy, including retail trade, education and health services.

In four of the six major recoveries since 1970, women have bounced back better than men. So what’s different this time? One factor appears to be simply that large numbers of men lost jobs in the recession — thus more men are looking for work and more are getting hired. It also appears that men have become more flexible about the kinds of jobs they’re willing to take. Men who were in more male-centered jobs like construction and manufacturing (which were really hurt by the recession) and who might never have considered working in something like retail or health care seem to be more willing than before.

(MORE: In Many Cities, Jobs Recovery Could be a Decade Away)

But as the recovery (hopefully) intensifies — some good news came today, with 157,000 private sector jobs reportedly added in June — we’ll start to unravel more about this strange, long road to recovery. In the meantime, women can take solace in the fact they’re better at almost everything than men.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – States deciding whether to set up health insurance exchanges will get more information on Monday when the Obama administration reveals more on how these complex marketplaces will work.

The federal government has so far given few details on this transformative part of the healthcare overhaul passed last year, although it had suggested it would do so in the spring.

The lack of specifics has left states in the lurch. Amid heated political debate, they face a January 1, 2013, deadline to decide whether they will participate in the program. If they do, they also have to create governance and information technology structures virtually from scratch by that time.

“States are most concerned about timeline right now,” said Krista Drobac, health division director at the National Governors Association. “These regulations will help states see what is feasible between now and 2013.”

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will reveal a framework for the insurance exchanges at a press event in a Washington area hardware store later on Monday.

The idea behind the exchanges is to create easy access to an open marketplace of insurance plans and to allow uninsured people and small businesses to band together to negotiate for cheaper rates.

The states can create their own exchanges, get together and share infrastructure or entirely opt out of participation, in which case HHS would come in and do it all itself.

HHS has so far given few hints about how such federally created exchanges would look, adding to the reluctance of many state legislatures and governors, especially conservative ones, to commit. Although most Republican-run states reject the notion of supporting “Obamacare” reforms, they also have to consider the possibility of opening their state healthcare systems to more federal scrutiny if they refuse to set up the exchanges themselves.

All involved federal agencies have been tight-lipped about the actual timing and content of the coming regulations, but they should shed light on the requirements for eligibility and enrollment in the exchanges, premium tax credit regulation and Medicaid’s place within the new framework. They will also detail guidelines for the exchanges in managing risk adjustment — an effort to equally consider patients with various levels of medical needs.

In a Huffington Post blog previewing her announcement, Sebelius said the exchanges would share three key features: They will serve as one-stop shops for all insurance needs, guarantee competition between insurers based on price and quality, and ensure basic coverage.

“This is how Members of Congress get their health insurance today,” she wrote. “And once these reforms are fully in place, buying insurance will become much more like buying a home appliance or an airline ticket.”

FLEXIBILITY VS DEADLINES

The Affordable Care Act, one of President Barack Obama’s landmark legislative victories, outlines initial guidelines for creating the exchanges, but leaves the states with what some see as tremendous flexibility for molding them.

For example, the law says a government agency or a nonprofit must run the exchanges, without saying where that entity should fit in the state hierarchy or how much independence and power it should have.

Others, however, see this flexibility as a threat to a timely rollout of the new healthcare framework, which has to be up and running by January 1, 2014.

In fact, it has already slowed many states down, according to Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The provision about exchanges and the heated political tensions around the law itself — which is facing dozens of lawsuits questioning its constitutionality — have led to worries that states are falling behind the schedule.

“(My biggest concern) is having it ready to enroll people and pay bills by 2014,” said Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger. No legislation is in progress in the state, and the conservative governor strongly opposes the law.

“The technology requirements are massive,” Praeger said, “and if we don’t have significant progress made by the end of the year, the IT experts tell us it’s going to be really hard to meet the deadline.”

So far, only 10 states have passed or enacted some sort of ACA-compliant legislation, according to Park’s research. Seven states have pending bills, while legislation has failed, expired or been withdrawn or vetoed in 16 states.

However, many states are doing research and other work even without any approving bills, Park said.

Two states, Louisiana and Florida, have already said they will not set up their own exchanges, leaving the responsibility to the federal government.

(Reporting by Andrew Seaman and Alina Selyukh; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

BOSTON (Reuters) – Former crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger’s longtime girlfriend is due in federal court in Boston on Monday, days after the aging gangster pleaded not guilty to all charges against him, including 19 alleged murders.

Catherine Greig, 60, was arrested with 81-year-old Bulge’s

on June 22 in their Santa Monica, California hide-out. She has been charged with harboring Bulger’s as a fugitive and could face up to five years in prison if convicted.

Greig is expected to appear before Magistrate Judge Jennifer Boal on Monday for a probable cause and detention hearing.

Her attorney has requested the defendant be released on bail to home confinement and electronic monitoring, according to court documents filed last week.

Greig, born and raised in South Boston, still owns a home in Quincy, Massachusetts, south of the city. Her twin sister Margaret McCusker will offer her home as collateral in the release as well, the filing said.

Greig’s attorney said Greig posed no danger to the community and was not a flight risk, as the government has suggested.

It was Greig, not Bulger’s, who took a star turn in the recent media campaign that quickly led to a crucial tip from the public and the arrest of the fugitive pair.

Authorities produced television spots that focused on Greig’s physical appearance, habits and personality traits.

Greig loves dogs and was known to frequent beauty salons, according to the FBI. She had previously worked as a dental hygienist and had plastic surgery before fleeing with her criminal boyfriend, 20 years her senior.

But during initial court appearances in Los Angeles and Boston, Greig appeared frailer and older than Bulger’s, her close-cropped white hair a striking contrast to the blond curls in her wanted posters.

(Reporting by Lauren Keiper; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Jerry Norton)

(The following story corrects proper name spellings throughout)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Space shuttle Atlantis arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday to deliver a last batch of supplies to the orbiting outpost on the final flight of the U.S. shuttle program.

Commander Chris Ferguson gently eased Atlantis into its parking slip on the station’s Harmony node at 11:07 a.m. EDT as the spacecraft soared 230 miles over the Pacific Ocean.

“Welcome to the International Space Station for the last time,” station flight engineer Ron Garan radioed to the crew.

Crews opened Atlantis’ hatch less than two hours later and the shuttle’s 4-member crew floated through the airlock into the recently completed $100 billion orbital outpost.

After a 30-year history that has cost nearly $200 billion and claimed the lives of 14 astronauts, the shuttles are being retired to make way for a new generation of spacecraft that President Barack Obama says will put U.S. astronauts on an asteroid and then on to Mars.

The docking capped a two-day journey that began with an emotional send-off from the Kennedy Space Center, where about 1 million spectators gathered on Friday to watch the shuttle thunder into the sky for the program’s 135th and final flight.

About an hour before docking, Ferguson gently somersaulted Atlantis so Garan and crew-mates aboard the station could photograph the shuttle’s delicate heat-resistant tiles.

“Poetry in motion,” said mission commentator Rob Navias as television cameras aboard the station relayed video of the sleek spaceship slowly backflipping over the cloud-speckled northern Atlantic Ocean.

The thousands of pictures will be sent to ground control teams to analyze for signs of damage to Atlantis’ heat shield. This safety procedure was added for all shuttle missions to the station following the 2003 Columbia accident.

Seven astronauts died when Columbia broke apart as it attempted to return to Earth with a badly damaged heat shield.

Preliminary assessments showed Atlantis was in good shape after its launch. The only problem that has cropped up so far is a computer unit shutdown early on Sunday. Three other computers were used for the rendezvous and docking and NASA hopes to recover the failed unit later in the day.

COMMERCIAL SPACE TAXIS

Atlantis carries more than 5 tonnes of food, clothing, spare parts, science equipment and other supplies for the station, a project involving 16 nations that took more than a decade to assemble.

NASA devoted 37 shuttle missions to building and outfitting the outpost. The shuttle’s legacy also includes launching and servicing the Hubble Space Telescope and dispatching dozens of planetary probes and Earth-orbiting satellites

Now that the station is complete, the United States is ending its 30-year-old shuttle program to pave the way for new spaceships that can travel to the moon, asteroids and other destinations in deep space.

Cargo runs to the space station are being turned over to businesses — Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences Corp. Both firms plan to begin deliveries for NASA next year. The supplies aboard Atlantis will buy time in case the companies encounter delays.

The shuttle’s retirement will leave the United States without the means to fly people into space on its own. Instead, NASA will pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the station until U.S. commercial companies are ready to provide that service.

The United States is investing $269 million in space taxi development work by Boeing Co, Sierra Nevada Corp, Space Exploration Technologies and Blue Origin, a startup owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

NASA hopes to resume flying its astronauts from the United States by 2015.

“I am very confident that with the president’s continued support and the support that I’m anticipating we’ll get from Congress, we’re going to be able to put Americans on American-built spacecraft produced through American innovation, NASA chief Charlie Bolden told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

Atlantis is flying with a smaller, four-person crew to accommodate the limited seating aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that would fly them home in the event Atlantis was too damaged to make the return trip.

All shuttle missions since the Columbia accident had a second shuttle waiting to mount a rescue mission if needed.

(Additional reporting by Chris Baltimore in Houston, Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Vicki Allen)

HOUSTON – A former KBR Inc. employee who said she was drugged and raped while working in Iraq lost her lawsuit against the military contractor Friday.

The jury of eight men and three women rejected Jamie Leigh Jones’ claims a day after starting deliberations in a Houston federal courthouse. Jones, 26, said she was raped in 2005 while working for KBR at Camp Hope, Baghdad.

Jones sued KBR, its former parent Halliburton Co., and a former KBR firefighter, Charles Bortz, whom she identified as one of her rapists. The Houston-based companies and Bortz denied her allegations.

The alleged sexual assault was investigated by authorities but no criminal charges were filed.

“I was going up against a monster,” Jones, sobbing loudly, told The Associated Press. “I’m devastated. I believe I did the right thing coming forward.”

KBR applauded the jury’s verdict, which in addition to rejecting Jones’ claims that she was raped also denied her fraud claim against the company.

“Since 2005, KBR has been subjected to a continuing series of lies perpetuated by the plaintiff in front of Congress, in the media, and to any audience wishing to lend an ear to this story,” spokeswoman Sharon Bolen said in a statement.

When the jury decided that Jones hadn’t been raped, a number of the questions before them were rendered moot, including accusations against Halliburton, said KBR attorney Daniel Hedges.

Jones said the civil trial wasn’t a fair fight. She said she felt she lost because the jury wasn’t allowed to hear details of her attacker’s past but were allowed to hear hers. Bortz said the sex was consensual.

Jones said she believed her bruises and the description of the rape would have swayed jurors.

“I just thought that the physical evidence would help. I guess the fact that my entire life was on display and (his) wasn’t” made a difference, Jones said.

Her attorney had asked jurors to award her as much as 5 percent of KBR’s net worth in actual or punitive damages. That would be more than $114 million, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Attorney Ron Estefan, in his closing arguments, accused KBR of neglecting to enforce its policies against sexual harassment for years by its contract workers in Iraq. The neglect facilitated Jones’ rape, he said.

Lawyers for Bortz and the companies argued that Jones concocted her story out of fear of gossip among co-workers at the camp.

Jones’ mother, Breanna Morgan, said she worried that the outcome might discourage future rape victims from coming forward, saying her daughter, “had to go through so much and she did it to help others.”

“I feel like, because she did that and then there was this verdict, others won’t want to,” Morgan said. “I feel it sends a clear message.”

Bolen, the KBR spokeswoman, said the “outcome of this jury trial as judged by her peers is the same result that the State Department got in 2005; that the Justice Department found in 2008. We are deeply gratified that the justice system has worked.”

Jones, who had been a clerical worker in Baghdad’s Green Zone, testified that she was drugged and then raped by a group of KBR firefighters. She said Bortz was in her room the next morning. During four days on the stand, she told jurors she has no memory of what happened because she believed she was drugged with Rohypnol, known as the “date rape drug,” just before she was sexually assaulted.

The Associated Press usually doesn’t identify people alleging sexual assault, but Jones’ face and name have been in media reports and she has promoted her case on her own website.

Bortz’s attorney tried to show that after the alleged rape, Jones did not appear to act like she had been attacked but instead went to work as normal, joked around and talked about camp gossip. Bortz no longer works for KBR.

Joanne Vorpahl, one of KBR’s attorneys, tried to portray Jones to jurors as someone with a history of being dishonest on resumes and job applications, including not disclosing in a medical questionnaire she filled out before leaving for Iraq that she had been treated in prior years for various things, including depression, dizziness and kidney and bladder problems. Jones said those were simply mistakes and she never intended to be dishonest.

Jones also accused KBR officials of locking her in a trailer after she told them about the rape and not letting her call her family. She testified she’s been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, takes medications for anxiety and had to have reconstructive surgery for her breasts, which were disfigured in her attack.

KBR and Halliburton, which split in 2007, were unsuccessful in having Jones’ case settled through arbitration as stipulated in her contract.

Due in part to Jones’ case, federal lawmakers in 2009 approved a measure prohibiting contractors and subcontractors that receive $1 million in funds from the Department of Defense from requiring employees to resolve sexual assault allegations and other claims through arbitration.

__

Weber reported from San Antonio. Associated Press writer Will Weissert in San Antonio contributed to this report.

LOS ANGELES – A federal grand jury on Friday indicted a Nigerian American man on stowaway charges after authorities say he breached multiple layers of airport security and got on a cross-country flight with an expired boarding pass.

Oluwaseun Noibi, 24, was charged with one count of being a stowaway as well as one count of attempting to enter a secure area of an airport by fraud or false pretense. If convicted of both counts, Noibi could face up to 15 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

Noibi, who remains in custody, is scheduled to be arraigned on July 18.

Deputy federal public defender Carl Gunn declined comment because he hadn’t seen the indictment.

Authorities said Noibi boarded a flight in New York on June 24 using an expired boarding pass with someone else’s name on it. The Virgin America crew didn’t realize until mid-flight that an extra passenger was onboard in a premium seat that was supposed to be empty.

After arriving in Los Angeles and spending several days in the city, Noibi was arrested for attempting to board a Delta Air Lines flight with another expired pass.

Noibi told federal investigators he was able to go through security screening in Los Angeles by presenting a boarding pass, his student identification and a police report that said his U.S. passport had been stolen, according to court documents.

It was unclear how Noibi skirted security in New York.

WHEATLAND, Wyo. – A quiet, agricultural town in central Wyoming is reeling from a shooting spree after a man opened fire inside a mobile home, killing his three sons and a brother and wounding his wife, authorities say.

Scores of students from Wheatland High School gathered just after sundown Friday to hold a candlelight vigil for the three boys. The oldest was a student at the school. Many students were in tears as they took turns relating stories about their classmate.

Police found the bodies of the boys and the brother, who was fatally wounded, inside the trailer home Thursday in Wheatland, about 70 miles north of Cheyenne. The woman, Suzette Ann Conant, was shot twice but was listed in good condition at a Cheyenne hospital.

Everett E. Conant III surrendered without incident and was charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, battery and a weapons violation. The murder and attempted-murder charges carry sentences of death or life without parole.

He was ordered held without bail on Friday. His court-appointed lawyer, Eric Palen, declined to comment. Police gave his age as 35 or 36.

Shackled at the wrists and ankles during the hearing, he whispered “yes” and “no” to the judge’s questions.

Wheatland police Officer Doug Wiggins wrote in a court document that he was responding to a report of a shooting at the home. Conant yelled at him from the doorway and had something black in his hand, Wiggins said, adding that he saw what appeared to be the lifeless body of a male child on a couch.

The officer said he spoke with Conant for about 10 minutes before he persuaded him to leave the house without a weapon. He was arrested without further incident.

One neighbor said Suzette Conant ran from the home wounded after the shooting erupted on Thursday night.

“She kept screaming at me that her babies were dead. `He killed my babies!’” said Jessica Kornder, who lives in the same mobile home park. “I was in the kitchen doing some dishes after supper and I heard these two `pows,’ and I thought it was fireworks. And then I heard this awful screaming.”

She was shot in the ankle and shoulder, said Wheatland Police Chief Randy Chesser.

Conant’s brother, Nacuma Roland Conant, 33, was taken to a Wheatland hospital where he was pronounced dead, Chesser said.

Authorities didn’t immediately release the names of the other victims. But a judge referred to one of the sons as Joseph, and a court document referred to the others as “C.C.” and “E.C.” Their dates of birth weren’t released, but the document indicates Joseph was 11 or 12, C.C. was 12 or 13 and E.C. was 17 or 18.

People at the vigil referred to the boys as Joseph, Charles and Everett. Chesser said a motive for the shootings wasn’t immediately known. He also said he didn’t know if the boys were Conant’s biological children.

“It’s pretty horrific. This is an unexplainable tragedy,” Chesser said after the vigil. “We have three children from three separate schools. And this is only the high school that showed up, and it looked to me like we had three-quarters of the student body.”

Jeanette Barber, a Wheatland teacher for the past 30 years, said after the vigil that she knew all three boys. She said they had an innocence and enthusiasm about them.

“I could do nothing last night but cry,” Barber said. “This is not something that you would expect to have happen in our community.”

Carmen Stockwell manages the kitchen at the Wheatland Middle School and also said she knew all three boys. “They were really very nice little boys, very polite. Always (said), `thank you.’”

Stockwell said Charles was in her school in the session that ended this spring. “He would always say he was having a good day. I’m going to miss him,” she said.

As police officers wrapped up the crime scene, Chesser said at least one handgun — possibly more — was used in the shootings. Asked how many rounds were fired, he said simply, “a lot.”

Conant worked briefly at the Wyoming Premium Farms hog farm just north of Wheatland this spring but quit after mentioning problems arranging child care, said Doug Derouchey, the general manager.

“Kind of kept to himself,” Derouchey said. “He just mentioned something about he was having difficulties kind of working it out time-wise.”

“He was, I think, having problems elsewhere,” Derouchey said.

Suzette Conant works at an AW restaurant in Wheatland, said Beth Horsley, a co-worker there. “She is the nicest person in the world. She didn’t do anything to anybody,” Horsley said.

A collection jar was set up at the AW for donations for Suzette Conant’s medical care and the family’s funeral costs.

“It’s just a very tragic thing,” said Jean Dixon, mayor of this agricultural town of 3,600 people.

“It’s hard to comment on something that just never occurs around here. It’s like, `How can it happen?’ This is a small community. We all know each other.”

Wyoming, with about 560,000 residents, averages just under 11 murders a year, state officials said.

__

Associated Press writers Mead Gruver in Cheyenne and P. Solomon Banda, Catherine Tsai and Colleen Slevin in Denver contributed to this report.

PORTLAND, Ore. – Tuna fisherman Jim Clayholt said Friday he and his son rigged makeshift sails to keep their disabled boat on course as they drifted south for five days along the Oregon Coast.

The 54-year-old Clayholt and his 23-year-old son, Tom Clayholt, were towed to shore after they got a radio message through to the Coast Guard Friday morning.

Coast guard aircraft had been searching for them since Thursday after their relatives got a text message from the disabled vessel and notified authorities.

From Florence, Ore., where the Coast Guard towed them in, Clayholt told The Associated Press that the 40-foot vessel was taking on a little water, so he and his son had to pump water by hand hourly after its battery died.

The sails they rigged from a sleeping bag, tarps and bedding, Clayholt said.

“It worked pretty good. We were making headway,” he said. “We were headed in the right direction. We more than doubled our speed, and we could control our direction.”

Clayholt said he hoped the apparatus would get him to his intended destination at Coos Bay, and he also hoped he might somehow make contact with commercial fishing buddies coming north.

He said he and his son put in at Astoria on Oregon’s northwest coast on Sunday, and the vessel he’d recently bought soon lost power.

The two had food and water for a multiday fishing voyage, Clayholt said. He said the weather was generally favorable, although they had a bumpy ride at times during the 135-mile drift.

The Coast Guard sent a search plane and two helicopters up Thursday in a 10,000-square-mile search that resumed Friday.

Clayholt said he was born in Alaska, the son of a bush pilot who taught him to be independent and take care of things by himself.

He said he’s been a commercial fisherman for three decades, working albacore tuna the last seven years. He said he lists his address as Eugene, where his mother and sister live, while his son is from Marina, Calif.

SEATTLE (Reuters) – A five-member military jury found a U.S. Army sergeant guilty on Friday of beating up a fellow soldier but acquitted him of charges of shooting at unarmed civilians while deployed in Afghanistan.

Sgt. Darren Jones, 30, of Pomona, California, was one of a dozen soldiers accused in connection with the most far-reaching prosecution of alleged wrongdoing by U.S. military soldiers during 10 years of war in Afghanistan.

The jury sentenced Jones to seven months of confinement and reduced his rank to private, Major Chris Ophardt, an Army spokesman, said. He could have faced up to 22 years in prison if convicted on all charges.

The military jury found Jones not guilty of firing on unarmed Afghans while on patrol in March 2010 and participating in discussions about staging killings of civilians to make the slayings look like legitimate combat casualties.

But it determined he did participate in the May 2010 beating of Private Justin Stoner, a whistle-blower whose complaint of widespread hashish use in his platoon led Army investigators to uncover the unprovoked killings.

Several gruesome photos, among dozens ordered sealed by Army officials, have drawn comparisons with pictures of Iraqi prisoners taken by military personnel at Iraqi’s Abu Ghraib prison and made public in 2004.

Five soldiers from the infantry unit formerly known as the 5th Stryker Brigade were charged with more serious charges including murdering unarmed Afghan villagers in cold blood during their deployment in 2010.

One of them, Jeremy Morlock, was sentenced in March to 24 years in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of murder and agreeing to testify against his co-defendants.

Seven other men, including Jones, were charged with less serious offenses stemming from an investigation that began as an inquiry into drug use by U.S. troops. Six of those cases have already been completed with varying sentences.

Jones was the first of the soldiers to request that a military jury, rather than a judge, hear evidence against him at a general court-martial that began on Thursday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Tacoma, Washington.

He had faced two counts of conspiracy to commit assault, one count of unlawfully striking another soldier, one count of assault with a deadly weapon and another of impeding an investigation.

The remaining five soldiers who faced more serious murder and related misconduct charges are scheduled for court-martial trials to begin in September.

One, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, called the killings’ ringleader by Army prosecutors, learned on Friday that his Article 32 hearing, similar to a grand jury hearing in civilian court, will be reopened later this month.

Several of the soldiers, including Gibbs, also are charged with keeping body parts as war trophies.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

The space shuttle Atlantis astronauts (from left, pilot Doug Hurley, mission specialist Sandy Magnus, commander Chris Ferguson and mission specialist Rex Walheim) leave the operations and checkout building on their way to the pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on July 8, 2011

It’s never easy to avoid the ghosts at the Kennedy Space Center. They’re everywhere, all the time. There’s the Challenger Memorial Highway and Columbia Road and Grissom Way — and the name Kennedy affixed to nearly everything. There are the full-size mock-ups of the famous old rockets — the tiny Redstone, the massive Saturn — now taxidermized for public display, decades after the last of them flew.

This week, it’s easier than ever to surrender to the ghosts, and it’s not just the heavy cloud cover and the torrential downpour that passed through the cape Thursday afternoon, July 7, and included a lightning strike on launchpad 39A, where the shuttle Atlantis is being prepped for flight. It is, of course, what’s planned for Friday — that unsettled weather permitting. At some point between 11:56 a.m. and 12:16 p.m., Atlantis will take off, ending a 30-year program that will have included 135 launches (though only 133 returned safely to Earth) and put 777 people in orbit (though 14 of them never came home).

NASA is happy about the global media swarm that’s here for Friday’s event but would love it if folks didn’t focus quite so much on the sense of finality to the proceedings. That’s not an entirely realistic wish. NASA programs have come to a close before, but there was always something that came next: Mercury gave us Gemini, which gave us Apollo, which gave us Skylab, which gave us the shuttle. And the shuttle will give us — well, no one knows for sure.
(See a photo history of the space-shuttle program.)

NASA does, however, have a plan, and it’s a potentially very good one. Sometime in 2016, money and politics permitting, a sort of grandson of Apollo will fly. The ship will have the same conical shape as the Apollo of old and will launch atop a conventional upright booster like Apollo did, but it will be much bigger — with room for six astronauts, not just three. It will be stuffed with software and electronics Apollo couldn’t even have imagined, and it will be rated not just for low-Earth orbit and flights to the nearby moon but also for deep-space destinations like Mars.

“The physics haven’t changed since the 1960s,” says aeronautical engineer Olivia Fuentes of Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the new vehicle. “The old Apollo guys got that all figured out for us. We’re just applying 21st century technology to that original idea.” The question is, In an era of shrinking budgets and an uncertain American commitment to space, will the old idea be good enough to fly?

The jumbo Apollo — officially dubbed Orion, and more prosaically known as a multipurpose crew vehicle (MPCV) — has actually been around for a while. It’s the last surviving component of the Bush Administration’s former push for a return-to-the-moon program, which also included plans for a lunar lander and two new boosters — one for low-Earth orbit and one for deep space. Announced in 2004, the program died in 2009, mostly because of budget constraints and the Obama Administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the grandiose idea. The White House agreed to let Orion and the deep-space booster continue in development but scrapped the lunar lander and left it to the private sector to figure out how to build spacecraft and rockets for trips to and from the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit.
(See TIME’s video “30 Years of Space Shuttle. Now What?”)

Still, in the five years Orion got before the program changed, the engineers made a lot of progress. Last year, a full-size, full-weight model of the capsule took its first flight, blasting off from a launchpad in White Sands, N.M., in an initial test of the vehicle’s launch-abort system. The spacecraft flew just a mile up and a mile down range, but all the same, it flew, serving as a stake in the ground both symbolically and technologically.

“We accelerated the ship to 15 Gs and brought it back down safely,” says program manager Mark Geyer. “A launch abort is the most difficult thing a spacecraft will ever have to withstand, and this one withstood it fine.” To prove the point — and, not incidentally, to help sell the Orion program — that test model is on display in a tent at the space center this week, its interior beams covered with the celebratory autographs of the flight team that built and flew it.

See “NASA’s Final Shuttle: The End of an Error?”

BILLINGS, Montana (Reuters) – Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer continued on Friday to press Exxon Mobil over an oil spill into the Yellowstone River and threatened to take the company to court as clean-up continued a week after the leak.

Schweitzer has been increasingly critical of Exxon in the days since one of its pipelines burst on July 1, spilling what the company estimates was up to 42,000 gallons of oil into the river.

“We’re going to hold them liable in court,” Schweitzer told reporters following a public meeting in Billings, the Big Sky state’s largest city.

Exxon, which said it was committed to a safe, effective clean-up operation, promised to “stay and make this right for the people of Montana,” spokesman Pius Rolheiser said in an emailed statement.

Montana formally opened a state office in Billings on Friday to address residents’ health and environmental concerns in the aftermath of the spill, a day after Schweitzer withdrew the state from a joint command team over what he said was the company’s failure to provide information.

The Democratic governor has sent a letter to Exxon asking the oil giant to spell out the chemical characteristics of crude that flowed through the pipeline, which was buried in the Yellowstone River streambed.

Schweitzer, a trained soil scientist, urged Montana residents to document damage and collect soil and water samples in containers that officials have provided them.

The governor has also warned Exxon not to work on the damaged pipeline without oversight by Montana and federal environmental officers. He has demanded the company preserve all documents related to the rupture and has asked federal regulators for the pipeline’s safety records.

Exxon has brought hundreds of high-paying jobs to several Montana communities, including Billings, where oil from the now ruptured Silvertip pipeline was refined.

Schweitzer’s apparent frustration with Exxon came to a head amid complaints from Montana residents that calls to Exxon’s hotline went unreturned for days.

EXXON STOPPED PUMPS WITHIN MINUTES

Exxon has apologized for the spill that dumped toxic substances into a river prized for near pristine waters, wildlife habitat and world-class fisheries.

The company said it shut down pumps on the pipeline to stop the oil flow within six minutes of discovering that something was wrong.

High and turbulent waters have made it difficult for boats to navigate the Yellowstone, hampering clean-up efforts and a probe of what caused the pipeline to rupture just west of Billings.

Schweitzer has pledged the state’s new office dealing with the spill would respond to each inquiry within 24 hours.

“This is your office, five days a week, eight hours a day until this mess is cleaned up,” he told a gathering of about 150 people, including residents who say oil fumes caused them respiratory distress, fainting and other health problems.

“Montana is responsible for managing that river. There are damages and no one from Exxon has sidled up and offered us a check,” Schweitzer said.

Federal officials said shoreline contamination along the Yellowstone — the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 states — has been observed over an area stretching at least 240 miles downstream from the spill site.

Gary Hammond, supervisor of the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional office in Billings, said scientists believe chemical exposure of river- and wetland-dependent animals and fish may prove devastating for years to come.

“This is a long-term problem,” he told Reuters.

In a press conference Friday, National Wildlife Federation’s senior scientist Doug Inkley said only 10 to 15 percent of oil spilled is ever recovered.

“Unfortunately, I am a veteran of previous oil spills and I am personally dismayed about what I’m seeing with this oil spill,” Inkley said.

(Additional reporting by Molly O’Toole, editing by Alex Dobuzinskis, Cynthia Johnston and Bernard Orr)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Betty Ford, the wife of the late President Gerald Ford, who overcame alcohol and prescription drug addictions and helped found a rehabilitation clinic that bears her name, died on Friday at the age of 93.

“I was deeply saddened this afternoon when I heard of Betty Ford’s death,” another former first lady, Nancy Reagan, said in a statement confirming Ford’s death.

Ford once was dubbed the “fighting first lady” by Time magazine because of her outspoken political views, which often differed from those of her husband’s Republican Party.

She strongly supported women’s rights while her husband was president from 1974 to 1977, working the phones in a vain attempt to get states to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which sought to give women and men equality under law.

Ford’s candor was surprising for the time. She took a tolerant stance on abortion and admitted without shame that some of her children had tried marijuana. Nor was she alarmed by the prospect of her daughter having premarital sex.

Ford also was an early campaigner against breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy in 1974, less than two months after her husband succeeded the disgraced Richard Nixon as president.

Her frank discussions about her disease helped raise awareness about breast cancer and she eventually took the same approach toward her alcoholism, which she battled even as first lady.

Ford’s problems with chemical dependency may have begun in 1964, when doctors prescribed her painkillers for a pinched nerve. She developed an addiction to prescription drugs and also became dependent on alcohol during the 1960s.

The Betty Ford Center in California came into being in 1982 after Ford was treated for her addictions at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Long Beach, and saw the need for treatment that emphasized the special needs of women.

“She has been an inspiration to so many through her efforts to educate women about breast cancer and her wonderful work at the Betty Ford Center,” Nancy Reagan, the wife of the late President Ronald Reagan, said in the statement.

“She was Jerry Ford’s strength through some very difficult days in our country’s history and I admired her courage in facing and sharing her personal struggles with all of us.”

PRAISE FROM OBAMA, GEORGE W. BUSH

President Barack Obama praised Ford’s courage and compassion.

“As our nation’s first lady, she was a powerful advocate for women’s health and women’s rights,” he said in a statement. “After leaving the White House, Mrs. Ford helped reduce the social stigma surrounding addiction and inspired thousands to seek much-needed treatment.”

Former President George W. Bush described her as a valued friend who “made countless contributions to our country.”

Ford remained an active chairman of the center’s board of directors for decades and also worked to help handicapped children, the arts and the fights against AIDS and arthritis.

For most of her adult life, Ford was best known as the wife of Rep. Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican, and the mother of four children. The couple had planned to retire from Congress in 1973 when Nixon, already under fire in the Watergate scandal, chose Ford to serve as vice president after the resignation of Spiro Agnew.

Ford became president after Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, but he was defeated when he ran for the presidency in 1976 by Democrat Jimmy Carter. Betty delivered her husband’s concession speech because he had lost his voice on the campaign trail.

Born April 8, 1918, in Chicago, Elizabeth Bloomer was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She wanted to be a dancer and studied under Martha Graham and modeled in New York before returning to Grand Rapids and marrying a furniture salesman. They divorced after five years and she married Ford in 1948.

In her later years, Betty Ford slipped from the public eye but returned when her husband of 58 years died in 2006. Her stately demeanor in time of grief brought her to the attention of a whole new generation that possibly knew her name only from the famous clinic.

(Reporting by Bob Tourtellotte and Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Christopher Wilson and Bill Trott)

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Lawmakers outraged over Casey Anthony’s acquittal have responded by proposing so-called Caylee’s laws that would allow prosecutors to bring felony charges against parents who do not quickly report missing children.

The new measures were triggered, at least in part, by an online petition that had more than 700,000 signatures Friday. Some questioned whether a new law would do any good because the circumstances of the Anthony case were so rare, but lawmakers in at least a dozen or so states have already floated proposals reacting to the verdict.

“Casey Anthony broke new ground in brazenness,” said Florida state Rep. Scott Plakon, who is sponsoring the proposal in his state. “It’s very sad that we even need a law like this, but Casey Anthony just proved that we do as unfortunate as that is.”

In June 2008, Anthony’s 2-year-old daughter Caylee was last seen at the Orlando home she shared with her mom and her maternal grandparents. For the next month, Casey Anthony, then 22, left her parents’ house and spent most of her time with friends, shopping and partying, telling her family and others that Caylee was with an imaginary nanny.

Anthony’s mother called detectives when Anthony could not produce her child. Anthony told investigators she hadn’t called them because the nanny had kidnapped the child and she had been conducting her own search, two of the numerous lies she told investigators.

Anthony was acquitted of murder in Caylee’s death, but convicted of four misdemeanor counts of lying to investigators. She was sentenced to the maximum of four years, but after serving nearly three years in jail awaiting trial, coupled with good behavior credits, she is set to go free next Sunday.

Florida’s proposal would make it a felony for a parent or other caregiver to not report a child under the age of 12 missing after 48 hours. It also makes it a felony to not report a child’s death or “location of a child’s corpse” to police within two hours of the death.

Had Florida’s measure been in place and Anthony been convicted, she could have faced another 15 years behind bars.

Other states are considering similar measures and the online petition at Change.org, started by an Oklahoma woman, calls for a federal law.

“It’s certainly something that we want to look into, because right now looking at the Maryland state law we’re not seeing anything that would fit the circumstances to the degree that we want to,” said Joseph Cassilly, a prosecutor in Harford County, Md., which is one of the state’s considering a Caylee’s law.

But others think it’s unnecessary.

“It only applies to people like her and fortunately those are not common everyday occurrences,” said Willie Meggs, who served as a state attorney in Florida for more than three decades. “I don’t think it changes anything.”

When Caylee was reported missing, the sheriff’s office launched a massive search, but her remains weren’t discovered until six months later, near the Anthony family home. The bones were in such bad shape, prosecutors said they had difficulty collecting forensic evidence from them, making it harder to present their case to the jury.

Anthony’s attorneys argued that Caylee drowned in the family pool. They said Anthony panicked and her father decided to cover up the death by making it look like murder. Anthony’s lies and conduct during the month her child was missing were caused by the sexual abuse she had suffered herself as a child by her father, her attorney said.

Anthony’s father vehemently denied the allegations on the witness stand and said he would have done anything to save his granddaughter.

In Alabama, a bill would make it a felony for a parent, legal guardian or caretaker to not notify law enforcement authorities within an hour after the death of a child and also require parents to report a missing child within 24 hours. In Kentucky, the proposal would make failing to report a child under 12 who has been missing for 12 hours or more punishable by one to five years in prison.

“God forbid we ever run into a mother like Casey Anthony again,” said Plakon, the Florida legislator. “If we do, that mother will be a felon.”

___

Associated Press writers Brian Witte in Annapolis, Teresa Wasson in Nashville, Jim Van Anglen in Montgomery contributed to this report.

Betty Ford said things that first ladies just don’t say, even today. And 1970s America loved her for it.

According to Mrs. Ford, her young adult children probably had smoked marijuana — and if she were their age, she’d try it, too. She told “60 Minutes” she wouldn’t be surprised to learn that her youngest, 18-year-old Susan, was in a sexual relationship (an embarrassed Susan issued a denial).

She mused that living together before marriage might be wise, thought women should be drafted into the military if men were, and spoke up unapologetically for abortion rights, taking a position contrary to the president’s. “Having babies is a blessing, not a duty,” Mrs. Ford said.

The former first lady, whose triumph over drug and alcohol addiction became a beacon of hope for addicts and the inspiration for her Betty Ford Center in California, died at age 93, family friend Marty Allen said Friday.

Details of her death and where she died were not immediately available, and Allen, chairman emeritus of the Ford Foundation, said he would not comment further until he received instruction from the family.

“She was a wonderful wife and mother; a great friend; and a courageous First Lady,” former President George H.W. Bush said in a statement on Friday. “No one confronted life’s struggles with more fortitude or honesty, and as a result, we all learned from the challenges she faced.”

While her husband served as president, Betty Ford’s comments weren’t the kind of genteel, innocuous talk expected from a first lady, and a Republican one no less. Her unscripted comments sparked tempests in the press and dismayed President Gerald Ford’s advisers, who were trying to soothe the national psyche after Watergate. But to the scandal-scarred, Vietnam-wearied, hippie-rattled nation, Mrs. Ford’s openness was refreshing.

Candor worked for Betty Ford, again and again. She would build an enduring legacy by opening up the toughest times of her life as public example.

In an era when cancer was discussed in hushed tones and mastectomy was still a taboo subject, the first lady shared the specifics of her breast cancer surgery. The publicity helped bring the disease into the open and inspired countless women to seek breast examinations.

Her most painful revelation came 15 months after leaving the White House, when Mrs. Ford announced that she was entering treatment for a longtime addiction to painkillers and alcohol. It turned out the famously forthcoming first lady had been keeping a secret, even from herself.

She used the unvarnished story of her own descent and recovery to crusade for better addiction treatment, especially for women. She co-founded the nonprofit Betty Ford Center near the Fords’ home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., in 1982. Mrs. Ford raised millions of dollars for the center, kept close watch over its operations, and regularly welcomed groups of new patients with a speech that started, “Hello, my name’s Betty Ford, and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict.”

Although most famous for a string of celebrity patients over the years — from Elizabeth Taylor and Johnny Cash to Lindsay Lohan — the center keeps its rates relatively affordable and has served more than 90,000 people.

“People who get well often say, `You saved my life,’ and `You’ve turned my life around,’” Mrs. Ford once said. “They don’t realize we merely provided the means for them to do it themselves, and that’s all.”

In a statement Friday, President Barack Obama said the Betty Ford Center would honor Mrs. Ford’s legacy “by giving countless Americans a new lease on life.”

“As our nation’s First Lady, she was a powerful advocate for women’s health and women’s rights,” the president said. “After leaving the White House, Mrs. Ford helped reduce the social stigma surrounding addiction and inspired thousands to seek much-needed treatment.”

Mrs. Ford was a free spirit from the start. Elizabeth Bloomer, born April 8, 1918, fell in love with dance as a girl in Grand Rapids, Mich., and decided it would be her life. At 20, despite her mother’s misgivings, she moved to New York to learn from her idol Martha Graham. She lived in Greenwich Village, worked as a model, and performed at Carnegie Hall in Graham’s modern dance ensemble. “I thought I had arrived,” she later recalled.

But her mother coaxed her back to Grand Rapids, where Betty worked as a dance teacher and store fashion coordinator and married William Warren, a friend from school days. He was a salesman who traveled frequently; she was unhappy. They lasted five years.

While waiting for her divorce to become final, she met and began dating, as she put it in her memoir, “probably the most eligible bachelor in Grand Rapids” — former college football star, Navy veteran and lawyer Jerry Ford. They would be married for 58 years, until his death in December 2006.

When he proposed, she didn’t know about his political ambitions; when he launched his bid for Congress during their engagement, she figured he couldn’t win.

Two weeks after their October 1948 wedding, her husband was elected to his first term in the House. He would serve 25 years, rising to minority leader.

Mrs. Ford was thrust into a role she found exhausting and unfulfilling: political housewife. While her husband campaigned for weeks at a time or worked late on Capitol Hill, she raised their four children: Michael, Jack, Steven and Susan. She arranged luncheons for congressional wives, helped with her husband’s campaigns, became a Cub Scout den mother, taught Sunday school.

A pinched nerve in her neck in 1964, followed by the onset of severe osteoarthritis, led her to an assortment of prescription drugs that never fully relieved the pain. For years she had been what she later called “a controlled drinker, no binges.” Now she began mixing pills and alcohol. Feeling overwhelmed and underappreciated, she suffered an emotional breakdown that led to weekly visits with a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist didn’t take note of her drinking but instead tried to build her self-esteem: “He said I had to start thinking I was valuable, not just as a wife and mother, but as myself.”

The White House would give her that gift.

In 1973, as Mrs. Ford was happily anticipating her husband’s retirement from politics, Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced out of office over bribery charges. President Richard Nixon turned to Gerald Ford to fill the office.

Less than a year later, his presidency consumed by the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned. On Aug. 9, 1974, Gerald Ford was sworn in as the only chief executive in American history who hadn’t been elected either president or vice president.

Mrs. Ford wrote of her sudden ascent to first lady: “It was like going to a party you’re terrified of, and finding out to your amazement that you’re having a good time.”

Her 2 1/2 years as first lady certainly looked fun. Mrs. Ford embraced pop culture, donning a mood ring, dancing “the Bump” with Tony Orlando, joining in the CB radio craze. In contrast to the stilted Nixon years, the Fords were known for rollicking White House parties with popular performers and dancing late into the night.

She became the first first lady to appear on a TV sitcom, doing a cameo on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” (Nine years later, Moore would check into the Betty Ford Center for alcohol treatment.)

Reporters kept after her with questions about social issues and family life, but Mrs. Ford refused to wring her hands over the state of America’s youth or the “new morality.” Perhaps she declined to judge because her own behavior was suspect by 1970s standards: she was divorced, had seen a psychiatrist, admitted taking Valium daily. She considered her personal values decidedly old-fashioned, however.

She was 56 when she moved into the White House, and looked more matronly than mod. Ever gracious, her chestnut hair carefully coifed into a soft bouffant, she tended to speak softly and slowly, even when taking a feminist stand.

Her breast cancer diagnosis, coming less than two months after President Ford was whisked into office, may have helped disarm the clergymen, conservative activists and Southern politicians who were most inflamed by her loose comments. She was photographed recovering at Bethesda Naval Hospital, looking frail in her robe, and won praise for grace and courage.

“She seems to have just what it takes to make people feel at home in the world again,” media critic Marshall McLuhan observed at the time. “Something about her makes us feel rooted and secure — a feeling we haven’t had in a while. And her cancer has been a catharsis for everybody.”

The public outpouring of support helped her embrace the power of her position. “I was somebody, the first lady,” she wrote later. “When I spoke, people listened.”

She used her newfound influence to lobby aggressively for the Equal Rights Amendment, which failed nonetheless, and to speak against child abuse, raise money for handicapped children, and champion the performing arts.

It’s debatable whether Mrs. Ford’s frank nature helped or hurt her husband’s 1976 campaign to win a full term as president. Polls showed she was widely admired. By taking positions more liberal than the president’s, she helped broaden his appeal beyond traditional Republican voters. But she also outraged some conservatives, leaving the president more vulnerable to a strong GOP primary challenge by Ronald Reagan. That battle weakened Ford going into the general election against Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Carter won by a slim margin. The president had lost his voice in the campaign’s final days, and it was Mrs. Ford who read his concession speech to the nation.

The Fords retired to a Rancho Mirage golf community, but he spent much of his time away, giving speeches and playing in golf tournaments. Home alone, deprived of her exciting and purposeful life in the White House, Mrs. Ford drank.

By 1978 her secret was obvious to those closest to her.

“As I got sicker,” she recalled, “I gradually stopped going to lunch. I wouldn’t see friends. I was putting everyone out of my life.” Her children recalled her living in a stupor, shuffling around in her bathrobe, refusing meals in favor of a drink.

Her family finally confronted her and insisted she seek treatment.

“I was stunned at what they were trying to tell me about how I disappointed them and let them down,” she said in a 1994 Associated Press interview. “I was terribly hurt — after I had spent all those years trying to be the best mother, wife I could be. … Luckily, I was able to hear them saying that I needed help and they cared too much about me to let it go on.”

She credited their “intervention” with saving her life.

Mrs. Ford entered Long Beach Naval Hospital and, alongside alcoholic young sailors and officers, underwent a grim detoxification that became the model for therapy at the Betty Ford Center. In her book “A Glad Awakening,” she described her recovery as a second chance at life.

And in that second chance, she found a new purpose.

“There is joy in recovery,” she wrote, “and in helping others discover that joy.”

___

Associated Press writer Mike Householder contributed to this report from Detroit.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – When Rodrick Shonte Dantzler raised a gun to his head after going on a deadly shooting spree, the bullet ended what those close to him described as a troubled life in which he frequently resorted to violence and often made threats against women and relatives.

Police say the 34-year-old ex-con targeted two former girlfriends in Thursday’s rampage, fatally shooting both of them and five members of their families, including his own 12-year-old daughter. He also shot and wounded two other people — one of them another ex-girlfriend — while leading officers on a chase through Michigan’s second-largest city.

“He went out hunting these people down. It was very much a purposeful act.” Police Chief Kevin Belk said Friday, describing Dantzler as mentally unstable but saying he knew of no clinical diagnosis or motive for the killings.

Dantzler’s rap sheet goes back to 1992, when he was charged as a juvenile with breaking and entering and car theft. That was followed over the next eight years by charges of trespassing, domestic violence, destruction of property, larceny and assault.

Dantzler’s mother, who said her son set fire to her house when he was 18, was among four women who sought protective orders against him in the mid- to late 1990s.

“Rodrick has a very explosive temper and will act violently without thinking,” Victoria Dantzler wrote in the petition filed in Kent County Circuit Court. “I’ve lived in fear of him hunting me down or worse, forcing me to hurt him in order to protect myself. I just wish for him to leave me alone.”

In May 2000, he was accused of firing a gun at people in a car, then firing four more shots when they attempted to read the license plate of the vehicle he was driving. He was sentenced that year to three to 10 years in prison for assault and paroled three years later.

One woman filed a paternity suit against Dantzler in 1995 and at least three sought child support from him. In each case, judges issued warrants for his arrest for failing to pay.

In a 1997 petition, Stacy Carter said she tried to leave Dantzler while she was five months’ pregnant because of repeated abuse. Dantzler tracked her down at a friend’s house and warned that she could not leave him “with the baby and myself still alive,” Carter wrote.

Dantzler, she said, once pushed her into a bathroom mirror and slammed her on the floor. He grabbed her jaw and told her he would “kill it before he brings another baby into this world.”

That same year, Angela Merrill filed a petition saying Dantzler threatened her and “slapped me in the face and then swore at me” over a tape he claimed she had.

Despite his record, neighbors on the tree-shaded street where he lived for the past couple of years described him as friendly and mild-mannered and said they were unaware of his criminal past.

“He seemed normal,” said Jannelle Windemuller, who lived across the street and a few houses down from Dantzler’s modest, lime-green house. He often frolicked in the grassy front yard with daughter Kamrie, who was killed in the rampage, and his two pit bulls. He would wave when driving or walking by, she said.

Nichole Martin, another neighbor, was afraid of Dantzler’s dogs, which he often allowed to run in the yard without leashes. Still, she said, she “thought he was such a nice guy.”

Dantzler was armed with a .40-caliber handgun and plenty of ammunition, the police chief said.

Investigators did not know where he obtained the gun. As a convicted felon, Dantzler would have been forbidden from legally owning the weapon.

Authorities identified the dead as: daughter Kamrie Deann Heeren-Dantzler; 29-year-old Jennifer Marie Heeren, an ex-girlfriend and Kamrie’s mother; 52-year-old Rebecca Lynn Heeren, Jennifer Heeren’s mother; 51-year-old Thomas Heeren, her father; 23-year-old Kimberlee Ann Emkens, a woman Dantzler had previously dated; 27-year-old Amanda Renee Emkens, Kimberlee Emkens’ sister; and 10-year-old Marissa Lynn Emkens, Amanda Emkens’ daughter.

The shooting spree transfixed Grand Rapids, a southwestern Michigan city with a population of 188,000. The tragedy began unfolding Thursday afternoon when police responding to 911 calls found four gunshot victims in one house and three in another.

Officers caught up with Dantzler after the ex-girlfriend he wounded called police and said he was following her in his car. After a lengthy chase through city streets and down an interstate highway, the gunman crashed his vehicle while driving down an embankment.

He then barged into a house and took several strangers hostage and periodically exchanged gunfire with police.

Another hostage who had hid in a closet emerged later when Dantzler became agitated because another man in the house was hard of hearing and the two had trouble communicating.

“She placed herself in more harm by exposing herself,” Belk said, describing the freed hostages as doing “amazingly well.”

During the five-hour standoff, Dantzler alternately threatened to shoot the hostages and pleaded with police to take him out. He ended the drama by shooting himself.

“It makes no sense to try to rationalize it, what the motives were,” Belk said. “You just cannot come up with a logical reason why someone takes seven peoples’ lives.”

___

Associated Press writers Corey Williams and Jeff Karoub in Detroit and news researcher Judy Ausuebel in New York contributed to this story.

BILLINGS, Mont. – Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer has decided Exxon Mobil and the state don’t make good roommates after nearly a week of working together in close quarters to clean up an estimated 42,000 gallons of crude oil released into the Yellowstone River.

State officials have moved out of a joint command post overseeing the response to the spill — a mess that has painted a fresh target for scorn on one of the world’s largest energy companies.

Security guards working for Exxon Mobil Corp. have closely guarded access to the command post on the second floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Billings, where the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies also are stationed. Attempts by The Associated Press to talk to government officials there in the first days after the spill were denied.

Schweitzer says the company and EPA have defied state open government laws by denying public access. So on Friday, he opened an alternate state-run Yellowstone River Oil Spill Information Center, underscoring mounting tensions over the pipeline rupture that has dirtied parts of the scenic waterway.

“Montana has a much higher standard than Exxon Mobil when it comes to transparency,” Schweitzer said. “We won’t be involved in secret meetings and secret documents.”

The Democratic governor pointed out discrepancies in the company’s reports of how long it took to shut down the pipeline after it ruptured July 1 and said company officials are downplaying the damage to wildlife.

With its multi-billion-dollar profits and the legacy of the 11-million-gallon Valdez oil tanker spill of 1989, Exxon Mobil offers an easy foil for a politician like Schweitzer.

Throw in the corporation’s massive ground presence to deal with the spill — an estimated 500 contractors and employees as of Friday, plus its role providing security — and it’s no wonder the governor’s folksy yet combative style has resonated in a state proud of its natural attractions and clean environment.

“I just want to thank you for who you are and for your skepticism of Exxon,” Susan Huntoon, 65, of Laurel, told the governor during a community meeting Friday at the state’s new command post. “We all know they want to spend as little as they can. We saw that with BP.”

Keenly aware of the company’s public image, Exxon Mobil executives have repeatedly apologized for the spill and have pledged to spend whatever it takes to restore the river.

But the company has made some glaring missteps on the public relations front, including the appearance that it was downplaying the extent of the contamination in the first days of the cleanup.

The company said then that the damage was concentrated within a five- to 10-mile stretch of river. That figure has been growing since, hitting 30 miles in recent days.

Later came inaccuracies in how long it took to shut down the pipeline from the company’s control room in Houston. After initially saying it took six minutes to shut down the pipeline’s pumps and 30 minutes to stop the flow of oil completely, the company revealed in filings with pipeline regulators that it took almost an hour.

Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. President Gary Pruessing has apologized for that, too. Company officials insist there was never any intent to deceive.

Spokesman Alan Jeffers said Exxon Mobil learned its lesson about dealing with spills forthrightly after the Exxon Valdez soiled Alaska’s coastline.

Exxon Mobil quickly came under fire in that case for downplaying the threat, deflecting the blame and being aloof. Crude oil from the tanker still lingers on some beaches 22 years later, and some marine species never recovered.

“Our focus needs to be on ensuring accuracy, the double- and triple-checking of data to ensure the public gets accurate information,” Jeffers said. “The principal of active and frequent communications with the community is one we take very seriously. It’s part of the system that was born out of the Valdez accident and is really important for us.”

EPA spokesman Matthew Allen said the agency has been pleased with Exxon Mobil’s efforts to date. The company has accepted fault for the spill and has heeded the agency’s orders on the cleanup, Allen said.

“It’s much better to have a company that acknowledges this is their responsibility and is doing the cleanup than to fight them all the way,” he said. “We’re happy with the level of cooperation.”

There have been confirmed reports of oil as far as 80 miles downstream from the pipeline break near Laurel, and on Friday, state officials said they had found significant amounts of oil 40 miles downstream near Pompeys Pillar National Monument.

The spill came after local and federal officials for months questioned the stability of the riverbank where Exxon Mobil’s 12-inch pipeline crosses the Yellowstone.

In June 2009, an 8-inch Williston Basin Interstate Pipeline Co. natural gas line that crossed in almost the same spot ruptured during high waters. That line has since been abandoned and a new one installed 30 to 50 feet beneath the riverbed, said Tim Rasmussen with MDU Resources Group, Williston Basin’s parent company.

A shallower 16-inch gas pipeline operated by Williston at the same crossing was shut down May 28 over fears that it, too, could fail, Rasmussen said Friday. That line has not been reopened.

At Friday’s public meeting, Schweitzer and other state officials told landowners along the river to collect samples of oil-stained water, soil and grass that they can use as evidence if they have to file claims against Exxon Mobil.

Schweitzer brought hundreds of sample jars to hand out at the event, which attracted about 100 people. About two dozen raised their hands when Schweitzer asked if there were riverfront landowners present.

Despite early worries that the spill could poison the Yellowstone, in terms of sheer volume the spill is minuscule compared to the more than 4 million barrels released during last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon spill into the Gulf of Mexico.

No one was killed in the Yellowstone River pipeline failure, and so far there have been no widespread fish kills or other catastrophic wildlife scenarios such as those the BP spill produced.

U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., said Friday that the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials will hold the first congressional hearing on the spill next week.

But Schweitzer knows the spill’s moment in the spotlight won’t last long.

Ever aware of the changing rhythms of the news cycle, the governor said he’s going to press the EPA and Exxon Mobil as aggressively as he can. And if the outside world is listening in, all the better.

“We’re going to keep poking them with a stick,” he said. “But eventually some congressman’s going to run off with someone’s wife or take a picture of himself, and then we’re out of the press. For now, it’s keeping the heat on the people in Houston, in Washington.”

SEATTLE – The “iron-clad alibi” of a former police officer arrested in the 1957 murder of a young Illinois girl is based largely on whether military personnel records from the time demonstrate that he was out of town when she vanished.

But it’s not clear those records still exist.

Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, told The Associated Press in a jailhouse interview Thursday night that he had nothing to do with the death of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph, and he wants her killer brought to justice. Her disappearance terrified the small farming town of Sycamore, about 50 miles west of Chicago, and drew the personal interest of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

He stuck to the same alibi he gave when first questioned by investigators more than half a century ago, when he was 18: that he could not have committed the murder because he had traveled to Chicago that day for military medical exams before enlisting in the Air Force.

McCullough said he didn’t believe investigators had ever tried to verify that he was in Chicago that day for medical tests — and records of those tests should still exist in his file at the National Archives repository of military personnel records in St. Louis, he said.

“St. Louis will have records of everything,” he said. “If somebody would go there, it would exonerate me.”

A fire at the archives in 1973 destroyed millions of military personnel records — including about 75 percent of records of Air Force personnel discharged between 1947 and 1964 whose last names came alphabetically after H. McCullough left the Air Force in 1960.

A clerk at the repository told The Associated Press Friday that no records could be made public without McCullough’s signed permission, and there was no immediate way to determine whether his records were among those destroyed. Officials would have to hunt through boxes of paper files to see if his was there.

“I have an iron-clad alibi,” McCullough insisted. “I did not commit a murder.”

McCullough, then known as John Tessier, lived near the girl and matched the description of the suspect given by Ridulph’s 8-year-old friend, Cathy Sigman, who last saw her on Dec. 3, 1957, at about 6 p.m. Sigman said she left Maria with a young man and ran home to get some mittens; when she returned 15 minutes later, the two were gone.

Thousands of people joined in the search for the missing girl, and many kept their own children locked indoors lest they be nabbed next. Maria’s remains were found the following April, about 120 miles away.

McCullough was arrested in Seattle last week after investigators said new evidence — including one record that does exist — undermined his alibi. He’s being held in the King County Jail on a fugitive charge pending his return to Illinois.

According to a police affidavit in the case, last year, McCullough’s high school girlfriend discovered his train ticket to Chicago behind a framed photograph of them — and it was unused. Detectives wrote that when he was questioned in 1957, he claimed he had traveled to Chicago by train.

McCullough maintained that he doesn’t know how his high school sweetheart wound up with the unused train ticket — but learning of its curious discovery behind the photograph tickled him. The couple broke up when he left to join the Air Force.

“She doesn’t know it, but I loved her for decades,” he said. “She got married, and I put it aside and said, `Eh, give up.’

“But she keeps a picture of me and her for 50 years. Imagine that.”

Though Sigman said she was never asked to identify McCullough as the suspect at the time, she picked his photo out of a montage detectives showed her last September, the affidavit said.

The affidavit also alleged that McCullough has a history of molesting girls. One young witness told agents in 1957 that he had sexually abused her on numerous occasions, and in the early 1980s he lost his job with the Milton police department in Washington state after he was accused of sexually abusing a runaway in her early teens. He pleaded guilty in 1983 to unlawfully communicating with a minor.

McCullough declined to discuss those topics with the AP.

“Don’t go there. What I did or didn’t do in my private life that would make me look bad, so what?” he said. “I didn’t commit a murder, and that’s all I’m charged with.”

The white-haired, white-mustachioed McCullough spoke with the AP by telephone receiver through a glass partition, wearing a bright red jail uniform, and began the interview by pressing against the glass a crinkled piece of white paper on which he had scrawled letters and words in various alphabets — by which he meant to demonstrate that he wasn’t an idiot, he said. He developed a love of studying other languages and alphabets while in the military, and maintains the hobby as a vehicle for learning about history, he said. He’s been studying the ancient script of cuneiform and said he has recently started praying to the ancient god of the Persians, Ahuramazda.

“I’m trying to get my wife to send me the cuneiform so I’ll have something to do here,” he said.

He said he himself called the FBI about the case a few years ago — around 2008, about the time the case was reopened — after a dream prompted his recollection of a slightly older boy who had lived in the neighborhood at the time. The boy, named Brooks, had been taken in by a family named Davies, McCullough said, and Brooks would have also matched the suspect’s description.

“I called the FBI,” McCullough said. “They said, `Thank you.’ And here I am.”

Those details could not immediately be verified.

McCullough said he didn’t remember everything he told the FBI in 1957, but he said there’s a good reason his train ticket was unused: He never used it.

He says his stepfather gave him a ride to Chicago, and after a long day of physical and psychological tests, he hitched a ride with someone he’d just met to Rockford. From Rockford, a drive of more than 40 miles from Sycamore, he called home to ask his stepfather to come pick him up.

Investigators wrote in the affidavit that they have verified that a collect call was made from a Rockford pay phone to McCullough’s childhood home that night, lasting from 6:57 to 6:59 p.m. If he made that call, he said, “How am I involved in a kidnapping at 6 p.m. in Sycamore? A fifth-grader can figure this out.”

Rockford is roughly on the way from Sycamore to where the girl’s body was eventually discovered, in far northwestern Illinois.

McCullough was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1939, and said he moved with his mother to England when she took a position as a searchlight operator with the Royal Air Force, once lighting up a Nazi plane during a bombing raid. His father left when he was 3 — his mother claimed he was killed in the war, but McCullough always suspected that he simply left the family.

He and his mother came to the U.S. in 1946 and settled in Sycamore, where he lived until he was 18, he said. He said the town was a lot like the television show “Happy Days” when he was growing up.

McCullough said he served four years in the Air Force followed by 10 in the Army, including a stint in Vietnam for which he said he was awarded a Bronze Star. He then settled in Washington state, where he worked as a police officer and security guard and started a company driving pilots between hotels and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He married three times, the last time to his current wife in 1994. It was then that he changed his name from Tessier, his stepfather’s name, to McCullough, his mother’s maiden name.

He had been living with his wife at a North Seattle retirement home, where he worked as a night watchman, when he was arrested. Residents there describe him as pleasant and helpful.

“If I’d have done this, how could I have possibly lived with myself?” he said. “That had to have been an emotional trauma.”

___

Jim Suhr contributed from St. Louis, and Michael Tarm contributed from Chicago.

Gene Johnson can be reached at http://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

MILWAUKEE (Reuters) – Republican Governor Scott Walker signed a bill on Friday allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons, leaving Illinois as the lone state with a ban on concealed weapons still in place.

Under the Wisconsin law, gun owners who want to carry concealed weapons will have to get special training and permits. Permits and photo IDs are required when carrying a concealed weapon.

The state Department of Justice will issue permits to state residents 21 and over who get training and clear background checks that show they were not felons or otherwise prohibited from carrying guns.

“By signing concealed carry into law today we are making Wisconsin safer for all responsible, law abiding citizens,” said Walker in a statement.

Twice in recent years the Wisconsin legislature passed a law allowing concealed carry but then Democratic Governor Jim Doyle vetoed it. Doyle left office in January and was succeeded by Republican Walker.

Opponents of concealed carry have said that allowing more freedom for citizens to carry guns in public places will increase violence rather than reduce.

After Walker signed the bill at a ceremony in Wausau, guns will be allowed in most public places except police stations, courts, schools and businesses that post signs. Concealed weapons could also be carried in parks and taverns.

In April, lawmakers in the Illinois state House attempted to pass a measure that would have allowed gun owners to carry them in public, but it fell short of the number needed to pass.

(Writing and reporting by John Rondy; Editing by Mary Wisniewski and Greg McCune)

Fatima Montano of Colombia challenges Heather O’Reilly of the U.S. during their Women’s World Cup Group C soccer match in Sinsheim July 2, 2011.

It was, without exaggeration, one of the more thrilling sports moments of the past 15 years, if not longer. On a penalty kick, Brandi Chastain, a midfielder for the U.S. women’s soccer team, fired a left-footed laser past Chinese goaltender Gao Hong, giving the Americans a victory in the 1999 World Cup. On American soil, in front of over 90,000 fans at the Rose Bowl and millions more on national television, Chastain joyously tore off her shirt, exposing what has become the most famous sports bra in history. Guys who always swore off women’s sports cheered. Thousands of young girls learned that they too could bask in the applause. The team landed on the cover of TIME.

“When I think about it now, I still get teary,” says Kristine Lilly, the forward whose critical head-save stymied a Chinese shot on goal and kept the Americans alive in sudden-death overtime. “We had such an impact on people’s lives. It was so much bigger than sports.”
(See pictures from the 2010 World Cup.)

Twelve years later, the U.S. is again competing in the women’s soccer World Cup, in Germany. And as we approach a relatively stagnant period on the American sports calendar I can’t help but wonder if a U.S. women’s team can capture the affection of fans once again.

After all, with baseball slouching towards the All-Star break and football and basketball mired in lockouts, our attention is up for grabs — and the American women could be a great story. As greedy guys, both owners and players, fight over their millions to the dismay of their loyal fans, the American women are vying for their first World Cup since that magical summer of 1999. The current team is loaded with talent: Hope Solo is arguably the best goalkeeper in the tournament. Forward Abby Wambach and midfielder Heather O’Reilly may not enjoy the name recognition, or gaudy statistics, of a Mia Hamm, but both can dominate a game. “Abby is a beast,” says Lilly. “And I love Heather’s fight.”

But the U.S. is no sure bet. After breezing through matches against Columbia and North Korea, a 2-1 loss to Sweden on Wednesday forces the Americans to square off against Brazil in Sunday’s quarterfinals: Brazil has Marta, a one-named highlight-film in the tradition of Ronaldo and Ronaldinho and the best player in the world. Both O’Reilly (groin) and Wambach (Achilles) are nursing injuries.
(See pictures of 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup.)

The competition is tougher as well. Since 1999, women’s teams around the globe have caught up to the Americans. In the last two World Cups, the U.S. has finished third. (Germany, the 2011 host nation, won both). Still, the U.S. has a clear title shot: before the Sweden game, the Americans hadn’t given up a goal.

The more difficult challenge for the U.S. women’s team might be to grab some of the cultural cachet the men’s game enjoys. Last year’s men’s World Cup, which set a slew of TV ratings records in the U.S., vouched for Americans’ healthy soccer appetite. The Internet and outlets like Fox Soccer Channel allow fans to keep tabs on global games. Americans are more sophisticated now about the sport, and let’s face it, there’s a “hip” factor associated with world soccer knowledge. People fancy themselves a wee bit smarter if they can name-drop Leo Messi at a cocktail party.

Women’s pro leagues, meanwhile, receive a tiny fraction of the support that the men enjoy. If the Americans push into the finals, or win the title in some sort of exciting fashion, you’ll hear plenty of talk about advances in the women’s pro game here in the U.S. But it’s worth remembering what happened to the old WUSA, a women’s league that tried to capture the outpouring of love for the ’99 team and failed. The league opened in 2001 and folded in 2003. The expectations were too high, and that league overspent itself into the ground.
(Read about whether women’s soccer is making a comeback.)

A new league, Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS), debuted in 2009, with more realistic goals and smaller facilities. But that league has also struggled to make an impact on sports fans at large; several teams have folded, and attendance dropped last season.

“There are so many things clamoring for our sports attention,” says Paul Swaangard, managing director of the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. “The men’s game is fighting the women’s game for mind share. It’s hard to see both coming out as winners.”

It’s quite likely that the women’s game will hold our attention for the next week, then return to its place as a niche sport. And for some, that may be fine. Because if an American player scores some athletic goal in the final, if Solo makes a sick save to clinch a victory, if one of the Americans come close to enjoying some Brandi Chastain moment, we’ll still remember it forever.

And what’s better than that?

Gregory is a staff writer at TIME. Keeping Score, his sports column for TIME.com, appears every Friday. Follow him on Twitter at @seanmgregory.

See the 10 sports moments of 2010.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.