Poverty

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.

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.

If you think Bluetooth is a rare dental condition and an app is what you eat before the entree, you might not be a candidate for today's high-tech, whiz-bang smart phones. Instead, you might be happier with a mobile phone geared toward seniors. Those phones typically don't have Web-surfing capability, GPS maps and video games. Instead they have large buttons, oversized digital readouts and hearing-aid compatibility, along with a relatively simple calling plan. Although senior-friendly phones aren't new, their lower prices and variety are. A recent price skirmish among wireless companies means seniors can get an easy-to-use cellphone and cheap service to go with it, said Mac Haddow, senior fellow on public policy for the independent and nonprofit Alliance for Generational Equity.

Re "When all else fails, rob the poor," Opinion, May 17 So the poor are arrested for breaking minor laws. How horrible. Let me tell you how real poverty worked in the past. My grandfather died at age 38, leaving behind a wife and four children. My grandmother never asked for welfare and never borrowed from loan sharks. She had no problem with the law. My mother and her three siblings were taught to value education. They survived it all and became members of the Greatest Generation, those heroes of the Depression and World War II. So, please, no more hand-wringing about today's deprived and destitute.

At the age of 80, Exaltacion Divinagracia thought that life would be easier. The petite widow still works part time at a nursery school. To keep the house she rented with her late husband, she has taken six roommates, all over 75. After church on Saturdays and Sundays, she drags a beat-up suitcase from one food pantry to the next in search of enough to eat for the coming week. Divinagracia takes home less than $13,000 a year, including public benefits. But according to the government's income standards, she is not impoverished.

The man grabs a metal bar, raises it and shouts at several boys playing on a see-saw. The boys' faces freeze in fear. They flee. This is a "child-friendly space." The man is a respected community leader. And the iron bar -- or stick, fist or broom handle -- is child discipline here in Andohatapenaka 2, one of the poorest districts of Madagascar's capital. The man, Honore Rakotomanana, 54, doesn't work at the center, funded and run by UNICEF. He just dropped in. But his is a typical attitude.

Lima was always gray. The Peruvian capital, for much of the year, had this overcast dullness; the sun rarely shone, it never rained, it was just damp and gray. Your hair didn't dry. Your clothes molded, literally, in the closet. When I returned to Peru this month for the first time in 26 years, Lima was still damp and gray. That had not changed. But many other things had. Peru has the fastest-growing economy in Latin America, having registered substantial growth nearly every year for a decade.

For more than a decade, conservative social theorist Charles Murray has made a living pushing the boundaries of politically acceptable debate about the welfare state. But nothing the contrarian thinker has written in the past drew the level of vitriol now engulfing "The Bell Curve," his new best-selling book linking IQ to race and poverty. Murray has spent the better part of the past two weeks fending off accusations that he and his late co-author, Richard J. Herrnstein, are reactionary racists.

Seventy boys in khaki uniforms cram shoulder to shoulder into chemistry class, where there are no chemicals or test tubes, only the squeak of the teacher's magic marker drawing diagrams and equations in the minutes before recess. If there is a genius among the rows of teenage faces, his gift may never be known. The boys are poor and many are undernourished, leaving class every afternoon to sell water and newspapers in the streets. The teacher earns about $200 a month, not enough to support his family, so he looks for odd jobs in the neighborhoods at the city's edge.

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.

During the election cycle we tend to ask: What does America mean; where are we going? And then someone decides to check on the Indians to find out the answer, as though Indians represent America's soul hidden in the attic. And of course politicians have long stood next to their "souls" and posed for pictures on the campaign trail. Within the last year, Diane Sawyer and "20/20" did a special on the sorry conditions at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and the New Yorker featured a grim photo essay on Pine Ridge too. The New York Times published a piece on brutal crime at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and another on the deep financial problems at Foxwoods, the Pequot-owned "world's largest" casino in Connecticut.

The mean streets of South El Monte aren't so mean any more as they are tired and sometimes desperate. The tiny bedroom community, which sprouts from the junction of the Pomona and San Gabriel River freeways, was once plagued by crime and gang activity. Now many of its residents are more troubled by poverty and unemployment. "The last three years have been hard, you know what I mean?" sighs Joseph Diaz, an out-of-work truck driver married to a secretary who also lost her full-time job. "Things can't get any worse.

The Passage of Power The Years of Lyndon Johnson Robert Caro Alfred A. Knopf: 736 pp., $35 "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume in Robert Caro's epic biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, encompasses the period of LBJ's deepest humiliation and his greatest accomplishment. It is a searing account of ambition derailed by personal demons in Johnson's unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. It is a painful depiction of "greatness comically humbled" when Johnson gave up his unbridled authority as Senate majority leader to becomeJohn F. Kennedy's disdained vice president.

NEW YORK—There are author success stories. There's winning the lottery. And then there's Chad Harbach. A long-suffering, often-starving MFA graduate, Harbach spent much of his 20s and 30s working temp jobs so he could write a novel, sometimes with barely $100 in his bank account. He thought no one would ever read his book, titled "The Art of Fielding. " It featured, after all, some pretty ambitious literary writing, a prominent gay character and a baseball motif, all no-nos for anyone with aspirations to the fiction bestseller list.

NEW DELHI - She was called dirty, ugly, a "little packet of poison," the offspring of donkeys. These days, Kalpana Saroj is called something else: a millionaire. Saroj, a dalit , or "untouchable," epitomizes what was once unthinkable in India: upward mobility for someone whose caste long meant she would die as she was born: uneducated, dirt-poor, doomed to a life of dangerous and filthy work. The manufacturing tycoon - one admirer called her "a real slumdog millionaire" - is among a legion of dalits embracing new opportunities in business, politics, the arts and academia as prejudices ease and economic reforms open new doors in a culture that traditionally emphasized fate and reincarnation.

My aunt Marion is in the hospital dying of liver and kidney failure, the result of her 20-year struggle with heroin use. I was told of her imminent death the same day news broke about a vaccine against the drug. "Breakthrough heroin vaccine could render drug 'useless' in addicts," one headline read. "Scientists create vaccine against heroin high," proclaimed another. Meanwhile, my aunt finds temporary relief in the ever more frequent administration of opiate pain medication - the very kind of drugs she used illegally.

His day begins at 4:30 a.m. The 64-year-old retired math teacher doesn't own a clock or even a watch, but the internal alarm that has kept him alive while so many of his fellow North Koreans have starved to death tells him he had better get out to pick grass if his family is to survive. Soon the streets of his city, Chongjin, will be swarming with others doing the same. Some cook the grass to eat. The teacher feeds it to the rabbits his family sells at the market. At 10 a.m.

Poverty appears to trump smoking, obesity and education as a health burden, potentially causing a loss of 8.2 years of perfect health. In a new study, researchers looked at health and life expectancy data from the National Health Interview Surveys and the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys and came up with various behavioral and social risk factors that affect quality of life, then used a formula to estimate the quality-adjusted years of life that...

When a big bank goes bust in Manhattan, forcing a thriving construction site in Mumbai to shut down and the price of recyclable scrap to plummet, entire families in the slums of India go hungry. This is the butterfly effect of the harrowingly interrelated global economy described in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo's first book, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. " This narrative nonfiction work catalogs a period of three years, beginning before the global market crash of 2008, of the Husain family, supported by a teenage trash-buyer named Abdul, and others who scrape together a living in a slum called Annawadi on a half-acre of polluted land beside the gleaming Mumbai international airport.

Philip Kuchma brightens as he drives past a vacant lot in Bridgeport, Connecticut's most populated — and poorest — city. "When you see open land like this, it's just such an opportunity," the longtime local developer said. "It could be used for attractive cottages with people walking to the waterfront. " Kuchma, 61, peers through rimless glasses as he gives a tour of his hometown. But you have to wonder: Are the glasses really working? The city is full of abandoned factories and derelict Victorian homes.