Girls

Two 17-year-old girls have been sentenced for torturing and butchering an elderly woman, less than three weeks after a pair of 10-year-olds were charged with murdering a toddler. Again, a troubled nation is asking, how could this happen? Edna Phillips, 70, was throttled with her dog's leash and stabbed or slashed 86 times. The mental images of the crime have shocked the nation just as the video pictures of little James Bulger being led to his death did last month.

AURORA, Colo. — On May 2, D'Avonte Meadows, a 6-year-old with an infectious grin and rambunctious streak, was suspended for three days from Sable Elementary in suburban Denver for crooning "[I'm] Sexy and I Know It" to a girl in lunch line. The school declared it sexual harassment and told his parents that, because D'Avonte sang the same song to the same girl before, he is a repeat offender. The news media pounced.

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.

Investigators don't know where 15-year-old Sierra LaMar is, but they are almost certain she is dead. For more than two months, the high school cheerleader's family has been holding out hope. They have organized repeated searches of the Northern California neighborhood where she disappeared and made numerous public appeals for help. On Tuesday, even as authorities announced the arrest of a 21-year-old suspect on suspicion of murder, Marlene LaMar vowed not to stop looking for her daughter.

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.

There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again - an adult entertainment if ever there was one - I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes. One doesn't often talk about architecture when writing about musicals, but the most impressive thing about "Follies," beyond Stephen Sondheim's bejeweled score, is the ingenious way it is constructed.

Los Angeles will gay anybody up. In the two months since I moved here, I've bought a yellow convertible Mini Cooper, a pair of Guess jeans and started using one of those fitness balls as my desk chair. This is a town so gay that Republicans don't even run for mayor. So when ABC Entertainment President Steve McPherson told Time magazine, in a story about the preponderance of gay TV show creators, that "if being gay makes you that talented, I'm going gay," I had to give it some serious thought.

Asmall girl is brought to the doctor by her mother because she is complaining of pain in her "private area." After asking some questions, the doctor, who suspects vaginal lesions, says he'll have to take a closer look, possibly doing a pelvic exam. The mother is gripped with fear. How will this small girl endure such a grown-up exam? The doctor explains the procedure to the girl, who begins to cry.

Lena Dunham is sitting at a Larchmont Boulevard cafe in a pale yellow dress and a blazer, rummaging around her bag for a bottle of green juice. She's drinking it to stave off illness caused by frequent plane travel - one of the hazards of being an in-demand wunderkind. Her upcoming HBO series, "Girls," was filmed in New York, where she sleeps in her parents' basement while she waits for her new place to be ready. But Dunham just spent half a year in L.A. so she could edit and consult with the show's producers, Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner.

Lego toys have always seemed pleasantly gender-neutral. Perhaps that's why the new Lego Friends line for girls has triggered a fair bit of protest from some health and equal-rights organizations. The new line, whose characters sport slim figures and stylish clothes, will contribute to gender stereotyping that promotes body dissatisfaction in girls, said Carolyn Costin, an eating disorders specialist and founder of the Monte Nido Treatment Center in Malibu. Online  petitions  have been started to protest the line, which includes a Butterfly Beauty Shop and a Your Fashion Designer Workshop. The International Assn.

ROME - A bomb exploded at the entrance of a high school in southern Italy named for the wife of a slain anti-Mafia judge, killing a 16-year-old girl and injuring at least four people as students were arriving at school for Saturday classes. Police were investigating the possibility of organized-crime involvement in the attack in the Adriatic port city of Brindisi, but authorities said it was too early to exclude other possibilities. They noted that the school is named for Francesca Morvillo, the wife of anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

Gene Kelly on Film "An American in Paris" Kelly sings and dances to Gershwin tunes in this 1951 Oscar best picture winner "Anchors Aweigh" Kelly meets Tom and Jerry in this 1945 musical, for which he earned a lead actor Oscar nomination "Cover Girl" Kelly and Rita Hayworth dance up a storm in this 1944 musical-comedy

'Girl in Progress' MPAA rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexual content including crude references, and drinking — all involving teens Running time: 1 hours, 32 minutes Playing: In limited release

As self-consciously precocious teens go, the high schooler at the center of"Girl in Progress"is an exceptionally contrived example. But contrivance is the engine of this young-adult comedy, which pretends to deconstruct storytelling clichés while never really transcending them. The transparent postmodern manipulation of Hiram Martinez's screenplay revolves around Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez), responsible daughter to an aimless mother, Grace (Eva Mendes), who had her when she was just a teen herself.

Rain Dragon A Novel Jon Raymond Bloomsbury: 272 pp., $16 paper FADE IN: A car idles in the foggy pre-dawn, pointed at the end of a cul-de-sac. Inside, an attractive 30-ish couple, DAMON and AMY, are worn from travel. She is dark-haired, pale-skinned and tense, and she leans against the passenger window. Behind the wheel, he carefully watches her mood as they evaluate the appearance of an owl in front of them. Good omen or bad? They can't decide, and continue on, lost.

Teenage girls in the United States are waiting longer to begin having sex - and using more dependable forms of birth control once they do become sexually active, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. New survey findings could shed light on why the birth rate among girls ages 15 to 19 in the U.S. has declined to record lows in recent years. In 2010, the teen birth rate was 34.3 births per thousand, with fewer babies born to teenage mothers than in any year since 1946, the CDC reported this April .  The new data were published Thursday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and were compiled from National Survey of Family Growth surveys in 1995, 2002 and 2006-2010.  The survey sample included males and females ages 15 to 44 and included questions about sexual activity and contraceptive use. From 2006 to 2010, the CDC researchers reported in their article, 57% of females 15 to 19 had never had sex, up from 49% in 1995.  When broken down among white, black and Latino girls, the proportion who remained virgins did not differ significantly among racial and ethnic groups.  There were differences in experience when the data were sliced by age group.

Toward the end of the first episode of HBO's "Girls," Hannah (Lena Dunham), in the hopes of persuading her parents to continue supporting her, hands them the half-dozen pages of the "book" she has been writing for the last two years. To finish this proposed nine-chapter opus, all she wants is $1,100 a month, for two more years. It's a wonderful moment, capturing the inevitable divide between generations. With all the gloriously narcissistic conviction of an academically coddled, white, upper-middle-class publishing "intern," Hannah truly believes she is writing a memoir - she just has to live it first.

'Fly Girls' Where: The CW When: 9 p.m. Wednesday Rating: TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with an advisory for coarse language)

The nine young women of Girls' Generation sauntered onto the performance stage of "Late Show With David Letterman. " Flanked by a DJ and live drummer, the South Korean pop group wore lacy black mini-dresses and thigh-high leather boots, as if they were hosting a goth cocktail party. It was a rare American network television performance from a South Korean music group. The song they performed on the January show, a slinky bit of minor-key dance-pop called "The Boys," owed an obvious debt to Kelis' catcalling hit "Milkshake.

Would "Safe"be as brutally fun as it is without Jason Statham's gravel-voiced comic timing and explosive physicality? Writer-director Boaz Yakin's urban shoot-em-up isn't exactly the most cohesive narrative, throwing together the Russian mob, the Triads, dirty cops (led by Robert John Burke) and a corrupt mayor (Chris Sarandon) into a New York turf war over a bunch of coded numbers that lead to … who cares, really? It's the pairing of Statham's disgraced cage fighter and ex-cop - pushed to the brink of suicide by gangsters who killed his wife - with an endangered 12-year-old Chinese math whiz (Catherine Chan)