Young Girl

Family and friends of Teak Dyer had planned to gather Friday to celebrate the popular teen-ager's graduation from Palisades High School. Instead, as the sunshine broke through the coastal fog and shimmered on serene Lake Shrine at the Self Realization Fellowship Friday, mourners held hands, cried and remembered with love and pain the brief life of the exuberant young girl who was murdered Wednesday. "She was excited about the future. She wanted to make her life really count.

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.

We've asked you for reviews of good books you have read: "The Fledgling" by Jane Langton A young girl named Georgie is determined to fly. She meets a handsome Canada goose that happens to land in her yard one night. They become true friends, great companions and even better, the goose teaches her to fly! But the neighbor--that horrible Ralph Preek--will stop at nothing to destroy the goose. Read the book to find out what happens.

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)

One of the reasons I seldom read the newspaper is because, invariably, every time I pick it up I read something that makes me so mad I want to spit! To charge a 15-year-old girl with manslaughter ("Girl, 15, Charged With Leaving Baby in Trash," Aug. 31) is only to institutionalize the abuse and pain she has already suffered. At the age of 17, I was forced to give up my newborn son for adoption. The nightmares, anguish and guilt I have suffered for the past 24 years have been hellish.

A man has been arrested and charged with molesting at least three girls between the ages of 5 and 7 over the past two years, authorities said Wednesday. Daniel Larson, 50, has been charged with 32 felony counts of oral copulation and having sex with a child under 14. Larson, who is scheduled to be arraigned today in San Fernando Superior Court, is being held on $1.8-million bail. Investigators said Larson told them that a female friend brought the girls from the San Fernando Valley to his home.

Teaching young girls to embroider small, oblong pieces of cloth as evidence of beginning proficiency with needle and thread is an idea that has been out of fashion since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th Century, the need for hand-stitching to mark initials on clothing and linens was eradicated by the cheap availability of indelible ink and by the unstoppable emergence of mass production. The making of embroidered samplers was suddenly obsolete.

A young girl was molested Friday while walking near an elementary school in the 10th such incident in the Tujunga area in the past 4 months, Los Angeles police said. Police, who believe one man may be responsible for the attacks, declined to release details of the latest incident.

Cynthia Topper sometimes chattered to neighbors about her daughter, bragging about how bright she was, how she liked going to school each day and how they would splash together in the backyard wading pool. But the neighbors rarely, if ever, saw the young girl Topper described. Some wondered if the youngster really lived in the rundown yellow house with its windows painted over.

Three years ago, a young girl immigrated from China to the United States to join her father. On Tuesday -- seven months after she was shot by a police officer found to be acting in self-defense -- a Ventura County judge will open the next chapter of her anguished life. Now 14, the girl will be sentenced for assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon.

There once was a girl who was bored out of her wits. It had been a wonderful holiday season, and she had received many fantastic gifts. However, she now sat in her Grandmother's kitchen watching the rain patter on her front lawn with nothing to do. "Nanna," she asked, "is there anything at all in your house that's fun?" Her wizened old Grandmother giggled under her breath and stood up from the kitchen table. "Follow me, sweet pea," she said in an inviting tone. She led the girl up a narrow set of stairs and into an old attic.

Inside Out & Back Again A Novel Thanhha Lai HarperCollins: 262 pp., $15.99, ages 8 and older The United States prides itself on being a melting pot, but the many immigrant stories that make up our uniquely American stew aren't always known and are even less frequently published by the mainstream press. Take Thanhha Lai, who, in her recent National Book Award winner, "Inside Out & Back Again," chronicles her family's move to the U.S. from her native Vietnam in 1975, shortly after the fall of Saigon.

After years of seeing their painstaking research ignored by political appointees during the George W. Bush administration, federal scientists heaved sighs of relief when newly elected President Obama vowed that science would no longer be countermanded by political ideology. On Wednesday, however, they were given reason to wonder if that was true, as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, deciding that teenagers under age 17 would not be given over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer A novel Michelle Hodkin Simon & Schuster: 456 pp., $16.99, for readers age 14 and older Post traumatic stress disorder is a mental health condition most often associated with military veterans. In "The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer," it's the back story to an unsettling, paranormal romance. There are echoes of Stephen King's classic "Carrie" in this young-adult series kickoff. Mara Dyer is a telekinetic 17-year-old who unwittingly murders people with her mind.

Saturday in New Hampshire, Texas Gov. Rick Perry got a question he wasn't expecting. Well, it wasn't the question that was surprising so much as the person who asked it. During a morning meet-and-greet in the banquet room of the Atkinson Resort & Country Club, a public golf course in a bucolic part of southeast New Hampshire, a little red-headed girl raised her hand. Maybe it was the Perry sticker on her shirt that caught the candidate's eye. “What is your policy on the state of Israel?

Late one afternoon a young girl with a large basket was seen hurrying along a dirt road toward a distant forest. Suddenly from out of the bushes jumped an impish man dressed in a red velvet vest and leather breeches. The girl came to a startled halt. "What do you have in that basket?" the man demanded to know. "Pies and goodies for a sick lady," the girl replied fearlessly. The mischievous man grinned. Then he began to whirl in a frantic circle. His shirt billowed out like sails in a wind and fine powdery dust rose in the air as his turned-up shoes shuffled faster and faster.

The young girl told classmates, who told school employees, who told county social workers. But her sexual abuse by a school board member continued for years and some of the school officials who worked with him want to know why. Last week, Brian E. Martin, 49, a member of Ventura County's Rio School District board since 2006, pleaded guilty to continuous sexual molestation of a girl under age 15 and inflicting "great bodily harm" — by...

Convicted murderer Richard Lucio DeHoyos told jurors Wednesday that he killed and sodomized a 9-year-old Santa Ana girl while in a rage over losing his job at a fast-food restaurant earlier that day. Taking the witness stand for the first time since the 1989 slaying of Nadia Puente, DeHoyos, 35, said he wanted to kill the Taco Bell manager who fired him, but instead took his anger out on Nadia. He said he later apologized to her lifeless body.

Although it is based on a popular Danish series, the show that AMC's "The Killing" most quickly evokes — with its brooding skies, ominous waters and complicated murder-mystery cast — is "Twin Peaks," a fact that AMC seems more than happy to leverage. "Who Killed Rosie Larsen?" is the show's promo, a direct homage, or rip-off, of "Who Killed Laura Palmer?," a question that kept American audiences enthralled for two seasons (though in hindsight it feels like more.) But "The Killing," which premieres Sunday, is not "Twin Peaks," nor was it meant to be; although they both revolve around the murder of a young girl under the lachrymose skies of Washington state, the similarities end there.

The Oracle of Stamboul A Novel Michael David Lukas Harper: 294 pp., $24.99 Michael David Lukas' beguiling first novel starts with a familiar storyline, the hero's journey that underpins epic fantasy series such as "The Chronicles of Narnia" (C.S. Lewis), "The Lord of the Rings" (Tolkien), the Harry Potter books (J.K. Rowling) and George Lucas' "Star Wars. " But Lukas veers from the tried-and-true, making "The Oracle of Stamboul" a novel that offers delightful surprises.