Children

In an odd yet understandable marketing strategy, the folks behind E!'s new reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" have spent a lot of pre-premiere publicity time explaining what the show isn't. Which is to say, Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director will appear in but a few episodes and then only briefly. He will not, for instance, be slamming doors or engaging in filmed therapy sessions with his wife, Dina, around whom the show revolves (see title.) That doesn't mean the show is not about Clint Eastwood; it is. If the principal characters -- Dina, her 15-year-old daughter Morgan and 19-year old stepdaughter Francesca -- were not related to him, there would be Absolutely No Reason to watch this, which, by reality show standards, promises to be tame to the point of sedation.

After months searching for work and feeling increasingly discouraged, Natalie Cole caught a break — an offer of a part-time position at a Little Caesars Pizza shop in Compton. The manager scheduled her orientation and told her she had to pass a food safety test. She took the test — and failed. But rather than study and take it again, she shrugged it off. "I guess I am not working for a reason," she said. PHOTOS: A life spent battling poverty Cole isn't a victim of the struggling economy.

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

Robert Van Handel remembered the boy as about 9 years old, tan, effeminate. "Now that I think back on it, he was probably the most beautiful child that I molested," Van Handel wrote to a therapist. Van Handel, a priest who ran a boys choir in Santa Barbara, said he coaxed the boy into posing for nude photographs. He described the experience as "stimulating" in a graphic account of improprieties he said he carried out at a Franciscan boarding school there. For decades, the now-shuttered St. Anthony's Seminary was awash in dark secrets.

Times are tough enough for Californians; they're even tougher for Californians' teeth. "One-quarter of all adults and 28% of children in California have untreated dental caries [cavities]," says Len Finocchio, a senior program officer at the California Healthcare Foundation, a health advocacy group. "Our research tells us that many people in California have been avoiding routine care that might have cost about $100 for a checkup and cleaning, and then find themselves in the emergency room, where they get only an antibiotic, a bill that can average over $600 and instructions to see a dentist."

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Kerry Kennedy and Andrew Cuomo were married Saturday in a ceremony that merged two of America's most powerful political families. They swore mutual commitment to the oppressed--"the people who have disappeared in El Salvador, the children in shelters in New York." The bride, 30, is the daughter of Ethel Kennedy and the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and is executive director of the human rights center in New York City that bears his name. The groom, 32, is New York Gov. Mario M.

So how many omega-3 fatty acids are enough — and how should you get them? That likely depends on your age and your specific health concerns. The United States does not yet have guidelines for DHA or EPA, and consensus among nutrition experts is elusive. But specialty groups, some governmental agencies and individual experts have started to take a stand. For healthy adults without major medical issues, the European Food Safety Agency recommends a daily dose of 250 milligrams of combined EPA and DHA, while the National Heart Foundation of Australia suggests 500 milligrams.

Nearly a year after a social worker blew the whistle, Los Angeles County supervisors acknowledged Tuesday that a "crisis" had developed in a Wilshire Boulevard office building used to house difficult-to-place foster children and requested a new plan to house them. Supervisor Gloria Molina said the office near MacArthur Park, where the county's child protection agency has its nighttime, emergency operations, has become a "dumping ground" for hundreds of the county's most troubled children when social workers can't find a suitable foster home.

WASHINGTON - A widow who conceived a baby from the sperm of her late husband is not automatically entitled to Social Security survivors benefits to help raise the child, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. The 9-0 decision rejected the claim that a biological child of a married couple, even one born years after the father died, always qualifies as his survivor under the Social Security Act. Instead, the justices upheld the government's multi-part definition of who deserves survivors benefits.

For 18 years, Dora Sanchez Hernandez has fiercely protected her son. From the time Erik Esequizel was born prematurely at just 24 weeks, she has been there for him. Through 50 surgeries and two near-death episodes. Through the daily demands of feeding, bathing and dressing. Through abandonment by his father and advice from doctors to pull the plug. Now - in what L.A. County Superior Court Judge Michael I. Levanas called a "celebration of family" - Hernandez and 14 other families have been granted limited conservatorships over their disabled children.

Frank Edward Ray, the school bus driver hailed as a hero for helping to lead 26 children to safety after a bizarre kidnapping in the San Joaquin Valley town of Chowchilla 36 years ago, has died. He was 91. Ray died Thursday in Chowchilla of complications of cirrhosis of the liver, said his granddaughter, Susan Ray. On the next-to-last day of summer school in July 1976, Ray was driving a busload of children home when he slowed down on tree-lined Avenue 21 for a white van blocking the road.

The United States has reached a historic tipping point, with children born to Latino, Asian, African American and mixed-race parents now constituting a majority of all births, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. The long-expected demographic shift is considered a milestone for the nation, though one that California passed three decades ago when births to racial and ethnic minorities surpassed those to white parents. The new report shows that minorities accounted for about 2 million, or 50.4%, of U.S. births in the 12 months ending July 1 of last year.

In March, when I wrote that the tax increase proposals by Gov. Jerry Brown and civil rights attorney Molly Munger were unimaginative if not doomed, I got an email from Munger. She did not agree, at least with regard to her initiative. "Unimaginative?" she wrote, inviting me to meet with her. This week, I decided to take her up on her offer after watching Brown admit that the financial mess he told us about in January was nothing compared to the mess we're in now. Frankly, I don't know how the January estimates were so far off the mark, with a $9-billion hole turning into a $16-billion hole in less time than it takes to grow tomatoes.

'Life is short. Have an affair." That's the slogan of the Ashley Madison dating service, a website for people who want to cheat on their partners. That's right, unlike traditional Internet dating sites -- where you're expected to say you're unattached no matter what the truth is -- Ashley Madison is honest about its duplicity. Unlike match.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

Maurice Sendak's death was announced Tuesday just a few minutes before I was due at the residential foster home and school where I volunteer, teaching writing to abused teenagers. Sendak, the author and illustrator of "In the Night Kitchen," "Where the Wild Things Are"and other children's classics, once told NPR's Terry Gross that as a kid he thought that "adults seemed mostly dreadful. " I suspect the kids who find themselves in our foster care system would agree. I got to the school library before the class arrived, so the librarian and I had a moment to grieve about Sendak.

Clarence Ayers was baffled. At 73, he was raising his great-granddaughter in rural Fresno County. He relied on $334 a month in public assistance to help cover the teenager's expenses: new shoes when she outgrew her old ones, transportation to the after-school activities she enjoyed. But last summer, county officials said they were slicing his CalWorks payment by 10% and for the most perplexing of reasons: Over the years, they had mistakenly sent $10,000 to the girl's mother and grandfather.