Kids

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.

This much is certain: The parents of a toddler in Camden, N.J., have one clean kid. But police also want to be sure the child is healthy after the boy got stuck in a washing machine -- the result of a father's attempt at good-natured fun gone awry.  Despite the undisputed idiocy of the move, which was captured on a video gone viral, there are no plans to arrest the parents.

If you buy something from online auctioneer Property Room, you don't have to wonder if it was stolen. That's because it probably was. Property Room, started by a former police detective, gets its items from law enforcement property rooms nationwide. Most of its inventory of jewelry, bicycles, computers, furniture, tools, car stereos, cameras, sports equipment, portable music players and things that could best be categorized under miscellaneous -- or bizarre -- was seized from crooks.

American adolescents already carry a heavy burden of future heart disease risk, and while obesity has contributed mightily to their poorer health prospects, normal-weight kids are by no means off the hook, a study produced by the Centers for Disease Control says. In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics (read the full text here ), CDC researchers say that overweight and obesity among American adolescents -- those between 12 and 19 years old -- has pushed the  prevalence of pre-diabetes and Type-2 diabetes from 9% in 1999 to 23% in 2008.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

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.

Kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, are normally treated with behavioral therapy and stimulant medications. A new study suggests that a highly restricted diet can be just as effective at reducing symptoms in a majority of children with ADHD. Diet is not a routine consideration in diagnosing and treating ADHD in the U.S. or in Europe, where the study was done. Many doctors are open to the idea that certain foods might trigger ADHD symptoms in some kids, though they believe it's a relatively minor factor in most cases.

Alicia Silverstone's new video has much of America saying Ewwwwwww! The "Clueless" actress who is known for her healthy, vegan cooking and animal rights activism, posted a video on her website Tuesday that shows her feeding her child. The clip has gone viral. Why? It's all in her method as she seemingly takes her maternal nesting instinct to a new level. The video shows her feeding her child Bear Blu like he's...a baby bird. She chews of his food and then -- how else to say this?

It could be the rhinestone stud in her cheek, her thin resume, or her unwillingness to interview before noon, lest job-seeking disrupt her gym routine or interrupt her beauty sleep. Or it could be that this is the weakest job market for teenagers looking for summer work in more than half a century. But two weeks of pounding the pavement -- or at least occasionally scrolling through "help wanted" ads on Craigslist -- have produced not a single employment offer for my 17-year-old daughter . . .

"Bub Moose" Carol Wallace and Bill Wallace Bub Moose and his mom go to a valley where people live. Bub's mom tells him to stay away from people. Bub disobeys and goes to the people anyway. Will his mom find out? He also makes new friends. But when a bear is mad at his friends, can Bub stop him? Reviewed by Ryan, 11 Monterey Hills Elementary South Pasadena   "Mom's Best Friend" Sally Hobart Alexander Mom is blind. Mom's best friend is a dog. But her guide dog died and now she has to use a cane.

Gilt A Novel Katherine Longshore Penguin: 416 pp., $17.99, ages 12 and up King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded. If there's anyone in history who personifies the treacheries of marriage, it's King Henry VIII of England, who is best known for the beheadings he inflicted during a reign of nearly 38 years. What led to such a barbaric punishment for the sexual indiscretions of his betrothed is the central theme of "Gilt," which tells the fictionalized history of wife No. 5: Catherine Howard, "the forgotten daughter of the forgotten third son of the man who had once been Duke of Norfolk," writes novelist Katherine Longshore.

I was a pioneer of childhood obesity. By the time I was a junior in high school, I weighed more than 200 pounds. I was a fat kid before being a fat kid made you the topic of a national conversation and the first lady's pet project, back when Gatorade still tasted gross and no one knew how many calories there were in anything. For most of my childhood, I was the only fat girl in my class - I can still name the other two fat girls in my grade. Now, fat kids fill the playground and the high school bleachers, including a whole new breed of fat girl who wears skin tight jeans and mid-riffs and dares anyone to say anything.

MIAMI - The Carnival Destiny cruise ship hasn't even left port, and half the ship's guests are already wasted. Passengers pack the lobby bar, balancing luggage with buckets of ice-soaked beer bottles, and flashing room keys that double as charge cards to keep the drinks flowing. When it's time for a mandatory safety drill, the life-saving instructions playing over the vessel's intercom can barely be heard over sounds of drunken guests stumbling over one another, spewing obscenities, cheering, slapping high-fives and yelling chants like "Ain't no party like a … Kid Rock party.

You have to say this much for Desmond Hatchett: He has a way with the ladies. The 33-year-old Knoxville, Tenn., resident has reportedly set a Knox County record for his ability to reproduce. He has 30 children with 11 women. And nine of those children were born in the last three years, after Hatchett -- who is something of a local celebrity -- vowed "I'm done!" in a 2009 TV interview, saying he wouldn't father more children.

The class clown from Mr. Gadberry's high school art class has made good - and how. Rebecca Mieliwocki teaches seventh-grade English at Luther Burbank Middle School in Burbank - but not next year. Instead, she'll be on the road as the National Teacher of the Year. It took her a long time to get to the classroom - she once worked as a floral designer, doing the flowers for Elizabeth Taylor's private jet - and eventually to the White House, where a fellow teacher, President Obama, crowned her as a national teaching treasure.

Every morning when UC San Diego physicist Herbert Levine laces up his running shoes and chugs alongside Mission Bay, his earphones crackle with radio ads opposing a proposed $1-per-pack cigarette tax to raise money for cancer research. The ads are funded by the tobacco industry. They call Proposition 29, the tobacco tax that state voters will consider on the June 5 ballot, a bureaucratic boondoggle, an initiative that would raise mountains of cash for research but not a penny for treatment.

Last week, the Senate voted on a proposal by New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez to end some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry. The Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act was a curiously skimpy bill that targeted only oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas. Even so, the proposal didn't pass. But that hasn't stopped President Obama from calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz.

Some of the longest-lasting relics of my kids' infancies and toddlerhoods have been their pacifiers and their sippy cups.  Even now, with the boys 3 and 5 years old, we devote two drawers in our kitchen to a collection of jumbled lids, valves and cups (many featuring slowly fading portraits of Lightning McQueen.)  The binkies, which my younger son uses at bedtime and on long airplane trips, live in a banged-up plastic container perched on a high cabinet shelf.  Someday we'll be completely done with the stuff, but I've learned the hard way that imposing strict, newspaper-ish deadlines on the kiddie set doesn't always work to my advantage - especially when milk and upholstery are involved.  New research published Monday morning in the journal Pediatrics , however, suggests that the decision to take away the bottles, binkies and sippies could also boil down to a matter of safety.  It turns out that kids get hurt using bottles, binkies and sippy cups - usually, when they sustain a fall with one of the items in their mouths.  Researchers at the Nationwide Children's Hospital and the Ohio State University in Columbus reviewed Consumer Product Safety Commission records to try to ascertain how many kids wound up in emergency rooms with injuries associated with bottle, pacifier or sippy cup use between 1991 and 2010.  In all, they estimated that number to be 45,398 children - an average of 2,270 cases per year.

The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom A Novel Christopher Healy HarperCollins: 432 pp., $16.99, ages 8 and up Whether it's Cinderella or Snow White, Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty, princes play a key role in the happily ever afters of fairy tales. But what happens once these dashing young lads have swooped in to save their distressed damsels? What if, as Christopher Healy theorizes with his cheeky middle-grade debut, these princes turned out to be insufferable losers?