Young People

Disco legend Donna Summer, 63, died Wednesday night, reportedly of lung cancer. As of press time, her family hadn't released details about her illness, so it was unknown what type of lung cancer she had, and how long she may have been ailing. According to the American Cancer Society , lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in both women and men, killing more than 150,000 people per year -- more than colon, breast, ovarian and prostate cancers combined. In 2012, the group estimates, there will be about 226,000 new cases of lung cancer in the U.S. Survival rates of people with lung cancer are low. Only about half of people diagnosed with early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer (the more common type)

Barack Obama wanted to be a transformational president, and as we head into the general election, he may have gotten his wish - just not the way he or his supporters might have thought. Obama seems to have transformed the cohort of 18- to 29-year-olds, a whopping 66% of whom preferred him over John McCain, from passionate voters who thought Obama really did offer change they could believe in, into people feeling, in the words of veteran political analyst Charlie Cook, "disappointment and disillusionment.

Barack Obama wanted to be a transformational president, and as we head into the general election, he may have gotten his wish - just not the way he or his supporters might have thought. Obama seems to have transformed the cohort of 18- to 29-year-olds, a whopping 66% of whom preferred him over John McCain, from passionate voters who thought Obama really did offer change they could believe in, into people feeling, in the words of veteran political analyst Charlie Cook, "disappointment and disillusionment.

Re "Setbacks seen for autistic young adults," May 14 As the parent of a young man withAsperger's syndrome, the statistics on post-secondary employment for autistic students are not surprising. My son has a genius IQ and recently earned his bachelor's degree. He has submitted hundreds of resumes but can't land a menial job. Perhaps he is not assertive enough in an interview or has difficulty with eye contact, but this doesn't reflect his ability to troubleshoot a computer or his social networking skills.

Organizers of a Ventura County job training program announced that 160 summer jobs are available to young people in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks. The program, organized by the Job Training Policy Council of Ventura County, will offer temporary employment and job training to county residents between the ages of 14 and 21. To qualify for the program, applicants must be economically disadvantaged or be enrolled in a special education program.

Even the elders of this small Egyptian city in the shadow of the great pyramids of Giza could not remember weekly prayers like this one. The three extra truckloads of police officers who always sat outside the mosque to prevent trouble after the weekly gathering were nowhere to be seen Friday. The police station immediately across the street, as well as the headquarters of the hated security force next door, had been looted, gutted and burned. The government has always censored his sermons, but this time Imam Mohamad al Saba, whose name means lion, spoke freely.

The amount of time young people spend consuming media has ballooned with around-the-clock access and mobile devices that function practically as appendages, according to a new report. Young people now devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to daily media use, or about 53 hours a week -- more than a full-time job -- according to Kaiser Family Foundation findings released today. A few years ago, the same researchers thought that teens and tweens were consuming about as much media as humanly possible in the hours available.

Older people are, well, old. They are in declining health, confronting death and may already be losing some of the people closest to them. So why do many seniors seem so happy? Research shows that the golden years are often the happiest. The work by Dr. Laura Carstensen at Stanford, author of the book "A Long Bright Future," lays out a lot of the evidence for that theory. Now a new study shows how this phenomenon takes place in the brain. Researchers in Germany used functional MRI brain scans to examine 22 young people (average age of 25)

As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now. Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly. The decline of marriage seems especially dramatic in comparison to the way things were 50 years ago. In 1960, almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds and 82% of 25- to 34-year-olds were married.

At a Starbucks in South Los Angeles, 14-year-old Bill Kirkpatrick III sat down with his mentor, Joe Egender, to set goals for the coming year. On the teen's to-do list for 2011: maintain a 3.0 or higher grade-point average, become a better role model for his 8-year-old brother, make it as a starter for the school basketball team and be "the flower that grew from concrete" ? a reference to a poem by the late rapper Tupac Shakur. FOR THE RECORD: Big Brothers: An article in the Feb. 21 LATExtra about the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization said Joe Egender took his "little brother" Bill Kirkpatrick III to see Dr. Dre in concert.

MEXICO CITY - They areMexico's "democracy babies" - a generation that grew up just as the nation broke free of decades of all-encompassing one-party rule. Only 12 years ago, young people flocked to the polls with high hopes as part of what would be a historic ouster of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Now, as the country prepares to pick a new president in July,Mexico's young sound mostly disillusioned by the choices before them, and by joblessness and skyrocketing drug violence that have hit them especially hard.

Six teenagers have shown up in two San Fernando Valley emergency rooms in the last few months with alcohol poisoning after drinking hand sanitizer, worrying public health officials who say the cases could signal a dangerous trend. Some of the teenagers used salt to separate the alcohol from the sanitizer, making a potent drink that is similar to a shot of hard liquor. "All it takes is just a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager," said Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxicology bureau for the county public health department and a medical toxicology consultant for Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

Imagine Los Angeles without Homeboy Industries. Imagine that the 350 or so men and women who work at Homeboy's various operations instead had no help finding jobs. Imagine that the 500 or so young people in the pipeline for work at Homeboy were suddenly deprived of that chance for gainful employment, security, support and stability. Imagine that the thousands of young men and women who every year have tattoos removed at Homeboy instead showed up for job interviews with necks and arms and shoulders boasting of a life they'd prefer to put behind them.

Oh, Canada, so near and yet so far. We share a language, albeit with different notions of how to pronounce "sorry" and "about"; we use your streets and your studios to stand in for America in our budget-conscious television shows, and your actors to represent Americans, and your film crews to record them. And yet your own television is something quite different. "The L.A. Complex," which premieres Tuesday on the CW, is a Canadian youth-soap from Martin Gero (a veteran of"Bored to Death")

In this age of Kindle and iPad and e-books, I write by hand, on little notepads, in my car. I have written in my car since I was 22 and working on my first novel. Then, the car was a broken-down pale green Fiat. I sat in the driver's seat while my then-husband worked on it in our gravel driveway, yelling at me to pump the brakes or start the engine. Now I write in my 2009 Honda CRV while waiting in the high school parking lot for my youngest, or even at the curb in front of my house - the way Raymond Carver used to - before I go inside.

As a Republican who cares deeply about the future of the party and wants to see us win in November, I was thrilled this week when Mitt Romney told attendees at a closed-door fundraiser that he supports Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's Republican alternative to the Dream Act. The next step: Romney should endorse the proposal publicly and challenge Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to bring it up for a vote in the Senate. This would be good for Romney, good for Republicans, good for many hopeful young immigrants and good for America.

The health consequences of diabetes are well known for young people, but there may be more outcomes of the disease: a worse job outlook and lower wages. The findings come from a study published in the January issue of the journal Health Affairs . Researchers, focusing on the nonmedical effects diabetes has on teens and young adults, found that overall, people with diabetes have a high school dropout rate 6% higher than those who don't have the disease. Data on about 15,000 people were examined from four waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

Lupus nephritis can sometimes result in severe kidney disease,  a condition called end-stage renal disease. An alarming study published Monday found a significant increase in cases of this complication in people ages 5 through 39 and in African Americans. Lupus -- or systemic lupus erythematosus -- is an autoimmune disease that affects 300,000 Americans. It causes inflammation throughout the body as well as fatigue, joint pain and organ damage. Many patients eventually develop inflammation in the kidneys.

The nation's top prosecutor on Wednesday said he is poised to file charges in the Trayvon Martin case -- if the U.S. Justice Department finds evidence of federal civil rights crimes. U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. made the promise Wednesday while appearing before the 14th annual gathering of the National Action Network, a civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton. Holder praised Sharpton at the start of a speech recalling the progress made by the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and how the fight for equality and justice continues to this day. "I know that many of you are greatly -- and rightly -- concerned about the recent shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a young man whose future has been lost to the ages," Holder told the audience.

A closer look at Friday's jobs numbers reveals, well, more trouble on the economic front. For the general population, the unemployment rate is now 8.2%. But for teens ages 16 to 19, the jobless rate soars to about 25% . For Hispanic teens, that stat rises to 30%. For black teens, 40%. Not good. Part of the problem is that companies just aren't hiring much. Also, jobs in the fast-food and retail sectors that might usually go to young people just getting a start in the work world are being jealously clung to by grown-ups grateful for any paycheck.