Youths

The slides and wave pools at Irvine's Wild Rivers water park will be permanently closed at the end of summer to make way for an apartment complex. The 26-year-old water park and nearby Camp James, a summer day camp for children, must shut down or relocate when their leases end Oct. 2. The Irvine Co., which owns the land, has plans to build as many as 1,700 apartments on the site, which is adjacent to the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater —...

CANNES, France - Walter Salles carefully raises the fingers of his right hand and gently strokes the back of his left. "These are characters," he says, explaining the gesture, "who experience things not vicariously but on the flesh. Men and women in a quest for something they couldn't define yet, who are trying to amplify their knowledge of the world. " More than half a century after "On the Road" was published, 30-plus years since Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights in 1978, and nearly a decade after Salles began working on the film, Jack Kerouac's peerless anthem to the romance of youthful freedom and experience has finally made it to the screen with its virtues and spirit intact.

The curly-haired suspect in the sweatshirt faced the flash of news cameras, looking impossibly small. "When did you start to kill?" he was asked. "How much did you earn?" "How many did you execute?" He said he began killing at age 11. A drug cartel paid him $200 a week. He'd killed four people. "How?" came the final question. "I cut their throats," he replied. Then masked Mexican soldiers hustled him off, the way they do other drug suspects. The detainee's name was Edgar Jimenez Lugo, but everyone knew him as Ponchi.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — The blueprint was not original ... well maybe to the Kings, who spent too many seasons chasing success with a checkbook and patchwork trades. But General Manager Dean Lombardi followed a plan that was almost as old as the game, and had been successful during his time as the San Jose Sharks general manager. "You walk a fine line between getting younger and getting better," Lombardi said. The Kings have done both this season and are two victories from reaching the Stanley Cup finals after a 4-0 victory Tuesday over the Phoenix Coyotes in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals.

Craving adventure and escape from his broken home, Jerson enlisted with leftist guerrillas when he was in his early teens. He saw it as a way to emulate Che Guevara and bring social justice to this impoverished region of Colombia. Plus the rebels offered him new clothes and a cellphone. So three years ago the indigenous youth found himself in the Sixth Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which patrols the mountains of Cauca state. Two months later, chafing under strict rules and horrified by the killing of a childhood friend and fellow recruit by Colombian soldiers, he fled the rebel ranks.

Nicole Baker remembers one of the nights that Gary Gilmore stole into her dreams. She called him a fool, this murderous lover she once tried to join in death, and he vanished without a word. In the 10 years since Gilmore was executed, the woman he loved has found God. She has not found peace. "The things I went through are still in me," Baker said. "I still feel them sometimes, like on a cold winter morning, I look out the window and I get that same lonely feeling I felt when I . . .

I was surprised that Thomas Reid (letter, April 19) thought The Times erred in covering the background of the Vietnamese youths involved in the Sacramento store killings. Don't readers want an analysis of what led to such a tragedy? A look at the struggle some youths find in adapting to a culture so opposite in many ways from their own? This is not only a tragic story of a Vietnamese family's loss; it is an examination of the violence that many California youths of every color are pursuing.

The 14-year-old boy with acne dotting his chin yanked down the scarf concealing his face and recounted his 12 days in a Taliban training camp -- starting with the day six masked militants kidnapped him as he picked onions on a farm in the Swat Valley. They blindfolded him and brought him to an abandoned girls' school, he said, where he and scores of other Pakistani boys ran hills for 2 1/2 hours every day and listened to Taliban trainers extol the glory of waging holy war against the Pakistani army.

As California implements a new law extending foster care benefits to youths until age 21, social workers and policymakers should focus their efforts particularly on the hardest cases, according to a major new study. The study found that substantial amounts of money are being spent on Los Angeles County's so-called crossover youth — children who start out as foster kids and end up committing crimes that land them in the juvenile justice system. At least 10% of the 20,000 youths under probation supervision were foster children, the study found.

"La Boheme" is back. So too is Los Angeles Opera's enduring 1993 Herb Ross production. Of course, Puccini's endearing Bohemians are never ones to worry about wearing out their universal welcome. And Ross' warmly cinematic staging, which gets trotted out every few years, has long proved impervious to passing opera-production fashion, at least as an audience attraction. No, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion wasn't full when the curtain went up Saturday night on Act 1. But the hall was full by the time the curtain went up on Act 2. Blame an accident on the Santa Monica Freeway that added an hour to the drive from the Westside.

OKLAHOMA CITY - Score one for youth. And speed. And rest. And fun. The Oklahoma City Thunder couldn't have looked much better than it did during the 119-90 bruising it applied to the Lakers on Monday night at Chesapeake Energy Arena. It was the opener of the Western Conference semifinals and the series could close quickly. PHOTOS: Lakers vs. Thunder, Game 1 Most people picked the Lakers to lose Game1. Few picked them to be embarrassed. They trailed by 35 in the third quarter, were blanked in fastbreak points (13-0)

Baseball has made the pitch. But should Griffith Park make the catch? That's the situation at the eastern edge of the 4,310-acre recreation area where supporters of youth sports teams want the city of Los Angeles to build two Little League-size ball fields. But opponents say that's a bad idea because the fields would gobble up two acres of lawn, eliminate a popular group picnic area and require the removal of numerous trees. The dispute has been brewing for years and at times has turned nasty, with warnings by opponents that "screaming kids" using the fields will scare horses on a nearby equestrian trail and endanger riders.

The number of baby boomers dying from a "silent epidemic" of hepatitis C infections is increasing so rapidly that federal officials are planning a new nationwide push for widespread testing. Three in four of the estimated 3.2 million people who have chronic hepatitis C - and a similar proportion of those who die from the disease - are baby boomers. Deaths from the virus nearly doubled between 1999 and 2007 to more than 15,000, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

On a recent Sunday morning, at an hour when many a teenager is still prone in bed, Adam Bernstein, 15, and Eli Gruska, 13, were lying face down on the floor of a Los Angeles ballet studio. Both boys would soon be heading to New York City for the biggest ballet competition in the country. They and the others in this all-boys class were awaiting instructions from Marat Daukayev, former principal dancer withRussia'sfamed Kirov Ballet (now the ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre). Daukayev begins his boys' class with sets of push-ups, not pliés.

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?

Talk around the dinner table at Osvaldo Reza's home in South Los Angeles usually revolves around his mother's excellent homemade salsas. But this evening, between bites of chicken taquitos and salad, the discussion turned to his father, a truck driver whose company recently cut his hours because of the bad economy. After car and house payments, there's no money left, Carlos Reza said.

Investigators Tuesday were trying to determine why three youths were walking on the railroad tracks in Commerce when a passenger train struck and killed them. The victims were identified late Tuesday as Anthony Sandoval, 15; Gilbert Correa, 17; and Joseph Hernandez, whose age was unknown, said Lt. Larry Dietz of the Los Angeles County coroner's office. All three were from Montebello. They were walking about 9 p.m. Monday on an area of the tracks where there was no room for pedestrians, and they were unable to get off in time to avoid the Amtrak train, said Sgt. Michael Thomas of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

ALBUQUERQUE - How many of these could you answer? What is conserved in an inelastic collision? (Momentum.) Where were the Boer wars fought? (Modern-day South Africa.) What compositional technique did the 19th century French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz create? ( Idée fixe.) And what is the difference between the surface areas of two spheres with radii of four and six? (80 pi) The Granada Hills Charter High School students here for the national Academic Decathlon competition have spent months studying the guides those questions came from.

Teenagers looking for summer work will have a better chance of finding it this year, according to outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The improving job market, the firm said, has eased competition for the low-skilled, low-paying jobs that traditionally go to teens on school break. The employment environment for high-schoolers and other young folks 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.