Teens

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.

NEW YORK - A New Jersey man who was a teenage store clerk when 6-year-old Etan Patz vanished 33 years ago Friday told police he lured the boy into the store with promises of a soda, strangled him, then dumped the body into an alley - a dramatic confession that could solve one of the country's most chilling missing-child mysteries. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, speaking at a news conference Thursday night, said Pedro Hernandez, 51, of Maple Shade, N.J., had spoken to investigators for more than three hours, that his confession had been videotaped, and that Hernandez had told people over the years that he'd been involved in a horrible crime.

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.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — A 29-year-old farmworker was convicted Tuesday of the murder of South African white supremacist leader Eugene TerreBlanche, but his teenage companion was acquitted in the killing, which had sparked fears of racial violence. Chris Mahlangu was found guilty of killing TerreBlanche, his employer and longtime advocate of a separate state for white Afrikaners. Patrick Ndlovu, 18, who was 15 and present at the slaying, was found guilty of housebreaking with intent to steal.

'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.

A word of a warning to parents of adolescents, from the nation's poison centers: Yes, you've secured your medicine chest and your liquor cabinet; but a new thrill-seeking activity among teens might make you consider locking away the cinnamon shaker as well. In the first three months of 2012, the nation's poison centers have had 139 calls -- close to three times as many as were received in all of 2011 -- seeking help and information about the intentional misuse of cinnamon. At least 122 of those calls arose from something called the "cinnamon challenge" -- a game growing in popularity among teens in which a child is dared to swallow a spoonful of ground or powdered cinnamon without drinking any water.

Was it Superman's, Spider-Man's or Socrates' uncle who said, "With great power comes great responsibility?" Regardless, it would have proved sound advice for the suddenly telekinetic teens at the center of the raw, electrical charge of "Chronicle. " Thankfully, it's wisdom the filmmakers took to heart. This mind-and-fork-bending sci-fi saga comes from the freaky imaginations of director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis, who've packed their feature debut with smartness. Don't let its DIY sensibility fool you: "Chronicle" is ultimately telling a meta-story, built around the age-old conundrum - if you had superpowers that would let you do just about anything, would you do good or evil?

Teenagers aren't necessarily tuning out adults; they simply might not be able to hear them. The proportion of teens in the United States with slight hearing loss has increased 30% in the last 15 years, and the number with mild or worse hearing loss has increased 77%, researchers said Tuesday. One in every five teens now has at least a slight hearing loss, which can affect learning, speech perception, social skills development and self-image; one in every 20 has a more severe loss.

Relax, TV programmers. The teen viewer isn't going anywhere. The perception of today's teenagers is that of antsy kids bouncing back and forth between their computer screens and cellphones as they update their Facebook statuses and look at videos on Hulu and YouTube while texting their friends. The reality is that for all the time teens spend staring at small screens, it's still the television screen that gets most of their attention. "There is a popularized notion of the typical teenager constantly digitally connected....

Teenagers with chronic fatigue syndrome may push themselves too hard, which contributes to ongoing fatigue, claim the authors of a new study.   Researchers followed 301 adolescents with mononucleosis, which often precedes chronic fatigue syndrome in teens. They diagnosed 39 teens with chronic fatigue syndrome six months after the mononucleosis diagnosis. That group of adolescents was compared with 39 of the youths who had mononucleosis but who had recovered fully after six months.

James Franco is an actor-turned-artist-turned-author-turned-actor-playing-an-artist-named-Franco in the soap opera "General Hospital" — who has made a movie, "Francophrenia," that documents the experience. He's about as "meta" as it gets. Now Franco has brought his knack for melding pop culture and fine art in unorthodox ways to a new exhibition for Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art. "Rebel," which opens Tuesday, is a high-concept group show that is a loose, interpretive ode to the 1955 James Dean film "Rebel Without a Cause.

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.

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.

Mitt Romney apologized Thursday after a newspaper story described bullying behavior on his part when he was an 18-year-old senior at an elite, all-boys prep school in Michigan. The Washington Post detailed a 1965 incident at Cranbrook School in which a buttoned-down Romney apparently was incensed by the dyed blond locks of a junior known for his "nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. " He led a "posse" of students in a charge against the boy, the Post reported. "He can't look like that," Romney reportedly told a close friend at the time.

Anyone who's gone on a diet knows: It's easier to avoid potato chips if you don't have any. So it's not a surprise that researchers found that California high school students eat less fat and sugar and fewer calories at school than their peers in states that allow the sale of snacks with more of those items. What's more, the California students didn't compensate outside of school; they ate an average of 158 calories a day fewer than students in the other states, according to the study published Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.The California students' consumption outside of school was approximately the same as the students in the other states.

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.

Dog ownership appears to make teens more active, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Virginia. They surveyed 618 pairs of adolescents and their parents living in the Minneapolis area about the number of dogs in the home and how much time they spent physically active. About half of the teens also wore accelerometers -- devices that measure activity -- for one week. The teens in dog-owning families logged about 15 additional minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity per week after the researchers controlled for factors such as gender and socioeconomic status.

Taylor Swift has finally weighed in on whether she considers herself a role model for impressionable young people. And the verdict is ... she accepts! In an interview to be broadcast this Sunday on "60 Minutes," the singer said she believes she can be an influence among some fans, and she's OK with that. But how influential are celebs when it comes to health-related issues such as drugs, alcohol, smoking and weight? Studies show that teens' habits and choices may be affected by famous people they admire, but they're not the only ones who hold sway.

As they do on many Saturday afternoons, the teenagers from across Los Angeles county descended on the nondescript Fairfax district office building. It was time for the weekly editorial meeting at L.A.Youth the newspaper by teens for teens. The latest issue had just hit the hallways of L.A. schools, and the deadline for the next one was fast approaching. As more than a dozen students sat around a square of folding tables, Amanda Riddle, one of the adult editors, kicked things off with a question: What did they know about Trayvon Martin?

Teenagers looking for summer work will have a better chance of finding it, as an improving job market helps ease competition for low-skilled, low-paying jobs, according to outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The employment environment for high-schoolers and other young folk has made a dramatic recovery since falling to record lows in 2010, when the number of 16- to 19-year-olds working during the summer months was at its slimmest level since 1949. Last year, youth employment from May through June perked up 13.2%, or by 1.08 million jobs.