All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

A new report (PDF) today from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo revealed that big banks – including the recipients of billions in taxpayer-funded bailouts – paid their employees massive bonuses regardless of how the banks performed.

Correspondent Kelly Wallace is covering the story for tonight's "CBS Evening News". Earlier today, she discussed the report and previewed tonight's story in a conversation with CBSNews.com editor-in-chief Dan Farber.

One of the most striking things to me about the new national survey of students focusing on cheating by cell phone or using the Internet, which we are reporting for Thursday’s The Early Show, is how many kids don’t necessarily think it’s cheating at all.

Almost one in four middle and high school students surveyed said they didn’t think storing notes on a cell phone or texting during an exam constituted cheating. What? Cheating by any other name is still cheating, right?

Kyle Cohen, a senior at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey, tried to explain the conundrum to me this way: "I think just because you are not making the person to person contact (it's easier) to convince yourself that you are not doing something wrong."

Katherine Griffith, another Ridgewood High School senior, said she thinks kids think of it more as "helping each other out as opposed to I'm going to cheat on my test and look at someone else’s paper."

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I wasn’t bullied as a kid but I did come across at least one bully during my career. No names need to be mentioned. They know who they are! There were many days when I’d shed a few tears wondering why this was happening to me and in those moments, the bully was definitely winning. As hard as it was, I always tried to remind myself the bully was the one with the big problem, not me.

That’s the message the American Academy of Pediatrics wants doctors, teachers and parents to send to kids. The numbers are alarming – almost 30 percent of all kids say they’ve either been bullied or are doing the bullying. Three out of 10! And the rest have likely witnessed bullying or know someone who has been bullied or who is a bully.

In our piece tonight on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, you’ll meet 13-year-old Daniel Warburton, an 8th grader who has been bullied relentlessly since the 4th grade. He said it started as name calling, with kids calling him names like “faggot,” and turned physical on the football field last year when seven of his so-called teammates tackled him to the point of unconsciousness. A teammate who stood up for Daniel ended up being bullied himself and then sucker-punched Daniel as a way of regaining favor with the bullies.

“I know this happens every day and a lot of kids are going through this and me being one of them, it’s just really upsetting,” he told me.

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There is one quote that really stuck with me when we were researching ideas for tonight’s story on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about college students graduating into the recession. “Damn me for being born in ’87,” Suzanne Block told The Chicago Tribune back in March before graduating. “This is just a nightmare. There could not be a worse time to be looking for a job.”

Oh how right Suzanne is. Employers say they’ll hire 22 percent fewer grads this year versus last year. And while 51 percent of college seniors looking for jobs found one before leaving campus back in 2007, less than 20 percent were as fortunate this year.

Desperate times call for desperate measures? Well, maybe not desperate but unusual, creative approaches to the job hunt seem to be the norm, not the exception, as students try to find a way to stand out. Remember, today’s graduates are not only competing against their peers but against experienced 20-somethings and baby boomers who lost their jobs and are anxiously trying to find new ones.

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Kelly Wallace is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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When producer Melissa Smith first mentioned the idea of doing a story on how more and more people, anxious about the stock market’s daily gyrations, are kissing their stocks and bonds goodbye and saying hello to unconventional investments, like alpacas, comic books and wine, I kind of thought these folks might be a little crazy. I mean, alpacas? How could the llama-like creatures possibly be profitable? And is it really wise to turn your back on your 401k and a market which, over the long run, traditionally brings in a positive return?

I don’t have the answers to all of those questions, but after doing the story for tonight’s CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, I admit I did wonder if breeding alpacas could turn me into a millionaire. No, I’m not entirely serious, but meeting Peggy Parks, who started investing in alpacas a year ago, did get me thinking.

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Kelly Wallace is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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When I told my family I was doing a story about some of the first American women to engage in direct ground combat, despite U.S. policy banning them from ground warfare, my sister-in-law said she thought women have been involved in ground combat for years.

You may have thought the same thing or be surprised to learn that while women aren’t supposed to serve in direct combat, they are.

In our story tonight on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, we’ll introduce you to women who never expected to fire a weapon while in Iraq but who ended up in urban warfare.

“It’s the longest few seconds before you pull the trigger, seems like it’s all in slow-mo,” 27-year-old Shannon Morgan, a former Army Specialist in Iraq, told me in an interview. “But you just got to keep ...

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Kelly Wallace is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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Stories about child abuse have always horrified me – but maybe more so now that I have two beautiful children of my own. When I hear about the incomprehensible things mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, stepfathers and stepmothers, do to their loved ones, I look at my little ones and wonder how on earth anyone could hurt the most vulnerable, these little life forces who rely on us to take care of them and give them a happy life.

So needless to say, when I was pitched a story about how few Americans are actually reporting abuse when they suspect it, I knew it was something I wanted to do. When I learned more, including how four children die every day from child abuse and neglect – that’s right four children dying every day – I thought if there were more public awareness, maybe more lives could be saved.

I had a chance to talk with 26-year-old Julia Charles, who is one of the most inspirational young women I have talked with in my reporting career. She endured years of brutal beatings as a kid at the hands of her biological mother. She uses the term "biological mother" because she’s since been adopted by her foster mother whom she calls her mom.

"I remember scrubbing the bathtub and getting hit ...

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Kelly Wallace is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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After producer Tony Maciulis and I showcased a camp for wounded women veterans in June on the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric," our senior producers encouraged us to find a follow-up story. That was easy. What about the spouses and the caregivers, suggested a contact with the Adaptive Sports Foundation, one of the organizations which sponsors these free camps for wounded veterans and their families. We thought about it and realized while much has been said about the wounded veterans, less familiar are the real challenges and strains of the caregivers who love them.

Think about the numbers. Nearly 33,000 men and women have been injured in Afghanistan and Iraq and those numbers don’t include men and women with invisible wounds, the ones dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Behind many of these injured veterans, there is usually a caregiver, a spouse or a mom or dad, who is often overlooked.

Twenty-five-year-old Nancy Kules, whose husband Ryan lost an arm and a leg in an IED attack in Iraq in 2005, told us her needs took a backseat until the moment Ryan was able to care for himself. “I think they get used to being catered to, they get used to being taken care of,” she said during an interview with Ryan, 27, by her side. “And at some point, you do have to say the reason we rehabbed and worked our butts off for a year, for you to be able to walk, for you to be able to take care of normal things, for you to be able to cook is that so you can get off the couch and make me dinner, that’s okay, too.”

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Katie's on assignment, I'm Kelly Wallace.

When the news broke this morning that Randy Pausch had died, at 47, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, you couldn't help but feel a loss. This was a guy with a remarkable spirit, who refused to surrender to despair.

So he offered, instead, a gift: his famous "Last Lecture." To hear more, just click on the Notebook.

Kelly Wallace is a CBS News Correspondent based in New York.

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I wouldn’t say I was surprised to learn that according to a recent report, women are less prepared than men for retirement. We know women live longer than men (about three years on average), that women still don’t make as much as men and that women – more than men – are moving in and out of the workforce to take care of children.

But what was surprising is that women start saving later – two to four years later than men – even when the wage gap between men and women after high school and college is not as dramatic as it is in later years. Women of America – this is a big mistake. Just consider the numbers.

If you were to invest $1,000 a year (that’s just $20 a week) from age 25 to 35, you could turn your $10,000 investment into $168,000 by the time you are 65. But if you wait until you’re 35 and save $1,000 a year from 35 to 65, you’d likely end up with $125,000 – $43,000 less than what you would have had if you started saving earlier.

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