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Here's Barack and Michelle Obama with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his family. The State Department uploaded it to Flickr. (What an unlikely sentence!) Whoops—no one in Spain has ever seen Zapatero's Goth daughters before! According to Zapatero, Spanish law allows him to prevent the Spanish media from running any photographs of his 16 and 13-year-old daughters Laura and Alba. For their privacy, see. And because maybe it would be considered weird for the PM to have goth daughters, but it totally shouldn't be. It is a natural part of life, becoming a teenaged goth. Click to...

THE kids weren’t all right. They lived in the same comfortable Long Island town and were barely in their teens when they took their first hit of marijuana or sip of alcohol, propelling them on dark journeys they couldn’t seem to escape. Within a couple of years, they were in heroin’s grip. “My parents had no idea,” said one of them, a 17-year-old girl who, like other formerly addicted youths interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of her past drug use. “My mom thought I was smoking a lot of weed and taking diet pills, because who would’ve...

Fifty percent of Gaza residents are under 18 and Hamas is training many of them to lie on beds of nails to grow up to be tough terrorists. "No one will be able to mess with us after we become kung fu masters. Everyone will be afraid of us," one nine-year-old said.

AUGUST 10, 2009 Unemployment Among Teenagers Remains Stubbornly High ERICA ALINI Economists don't see much relief for unemployed teenagers in a recession that has trimmed hires and pulled many adults into the scramble for jobs typically held by teens. Unemployment of people ages 16 to 19 was a seasonally adjusted 23.8% in July after hitting a quarter-century high of 24% in June, the government said last week. That compared with last year's summer peak of 20.5%. Caleb Cross, 16 years old, waits to apply for a summer job funded by stimulus money in Fort Worth, Texas, in June. Traditional teenage...

A program operating on the University of North Carolina at Greensboro campus pays young girls not to get pregnant. Participants in the College Bound Sisters program earn $7 a week to stay baby-free. For 90 minutes a week, the girls learn about abstinence and the use of contraceptives while exploring the benefits of staying in school. The money earned is deposited into a fund and may be retrieved once the girl has enrolled in college. The program, funded by a grant from the state's Department of Health and Human Services, costs about $75,000 a year to operate. A total of...

The following is a copy of a report written by Matthew Robson, a 15-year old schoolboy, for Morgan Stanley on how he and his friends consume media. ... Internet Every teenager has some access to the internet, be it at school or home. Home use is mainly used for fun (such as social networking) whilst school (or library) use is for work. Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact...

GREENSBORO -- A buck-a-day -- that's the incentive being offered to young girls to keep them from getting pregnant, WXII-TV reported. The group College-Bound Sisters was founded at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro by Hazel Brown, a maternity nurse who thought too many teens were having babies. Brown said she hopes the program, which pays $1 each day to 12-to-18-year-old girls, will keep them from getting pregnant. In addition to remaining pregnancy-free, the girls must also attend weekly meetings. The program is funded by a four-year grant from the state. "Our three goals are that they avoid pregnancy,...

Two thirds of teenagers don't believe in God Nearly two thirds of teenagers don't believe in God, according to a study by Penguin books. Teenagers even say family, friends, money, music and even reality television are more important than religion. It also emerged six out of ten 10 children (59 per cent) believe that religion "has a negative influence on the world". The survey also shows that half of teenagers have never prayed and 16 per cent have never been to church. The study of 1,000 teenagers aged 13 to 18 was carried out by Penguin to mark this week's...

Teenagers, Gratitude, and a Culture of Affluence Holland, MI. Like many readers, or perhaps more accurately, like many readers with children, I read with great interest Mark Mitchell’s piece on “Cultivating Gratitude [1].” As the father of three children I have long made such cultivation a central concern, but must confess only middling success in the endeavor. One of the central difficulties we face as parents is the paucity of tools we bring to the task. One of our main tools is the use of rhetoric, but at a certain point – oh, let’s say the teenage years – parental...

Cheyenne Cherry tossed her ex-roommate's kitty, Tiger Lily (below), into the stove, then left so she didn't have to hear the cat's anguished cries. A Bronx teenager roasted her ex-roommate's kitten to death in a stove - then brushed off the incident as a joke when she was busted, authorities said Thursday. "I hate cats," Cheyenne Cherry, 17, allegedly told investigators when asked about the heartless crime. Cherry's confession came after she was arrested Wednesday by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She and an unidentified juvenile allegedly broke into Valerie Hernandez's Tinton Ave. apartment on...

Technology in all of its forms - social networks, smartphones, the Web, instant messaging, on-line gaming - is a net loss for today’s young people. At least according to one group of Silicon Valley 8th graders. “It’s bad for us, but it sure is fun,” says Eric Bautista, 13, one of the students in Sister Jolene Schmitz’s junior high school class at Resurrection School in Sunnyvale, California. Admittedly, this informal survey offers, at best, only anecdotal evidence. Still, it is pretty shocking that a group of young teenagers, all of them technologically very astute, and living in the very heart...

A report of a man pointing a gun at some teenagers on bikes at the Sears mall spurred an extensive police response and prompted school district officials to lock the doors at Fairview Elementary School Thursday afternoon. But it turned out the young adults had in fact been harassing the man and that he pulled a weapon from his vehicle for protection, police Lt. Dave Parker said.

CARBONDALE, Colorado — She traveled the world alone and had never been assaulted by anyone until Thursday in Carbondale. She lived there for about 2 1/2 years because she loved the town and thought it was safe. Now, she feels uncomfortable even walking to work to teach at one of Carbondale’s schools. “It’s chiefly the emotional component to all of this,” she said. “I can handle the physical injury. I can handle getting new credit cards and a driver’s license, but the fact that I don’t feel comfortable walking to school. I feel like such an idiot. I reveled living...

Dear Rep. Waxman, My congratulations on your reelection to the 11th Congress of the United States and promotion to Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. As a national leader charged with overseeing the improvement of the quality of our air, the safety of our food and drugs, health care, and a growing telecommunications industry, I want to appeal to you on behalf of millions of my peers in their teens and twenties. You’ve shown yourself to be a leader in education, women’s health research and reproductive rights for my generation. So I cannot help but wonder, why are...

A prosecutor in Kansas has failed to block the suspension of his law license by arguing that his alleged Asperger Syndrome played a part in his decision to show sexually explicit photos of drunken teens at a party to their parents. The Supreme Court of Kansas on Friday suspended Anderson County Attorney Frederick Campbell, 49, from practice for six months. The court concluded that he violated attorney ethics rules when he attempted to demonstrate to a group of parents the dangers of teenage drinking by presenting them with photos of teens drinking and engaging in sexual intercourse.

LINCOLN, Neb. – The mother was running out of more than patience when she abandoned her 18-year-old daughter at a hospital over the weekend under Nebraska's safe-haven law. She was also running out of time: She knew that state lawmakers would soon meet in a special session to amend the ill-fated law so that it would apply to newborns only. "Where am I going to get help if they change the law?" said the mother... To the state's surprise and embarrassment, more than half of the 31 children legally abandoned under the safe-haven law since it took effect in mid-July...

Towelhead and the Normalization of Sex With Children Hollywood's latest effort to portray pedophiles sympathetically. September 27, 2008 - by John Nolte Much in the same way 2004’s Downfall fleshed out Adolph Hitler without mitigating the monstrosity of his crimes, Solondz and Baker present their child rapist as a three-dimensional being without once asking us to feel sorry for him. Admittedly, both Downfall and Happiness polarized audiences with these portrayals, but I would argue that the more realistic the monster, the more terrifying the behavior. There’s nothing, however, worthy of defense in a spate of recent films that go well...

More than 1,000 Teens, the Bishop and the Eucharist Focus on Eucharist is 'historic day' for diocese at its largest gathering of youthMORRISTOWN - Young people from parishes and Catholic high schools from every corner of the diocese - more than 1,000 - came to Delbarton School here May 1to be with Bishop Serratelli for a Day on the Eucharist, guided by the theme "Made Right in God's Sight by Faith." Activities for the day, which was hailed as  the largest gathering of youth in the diocese's history, were designed to awaken thee teens' faith and inspire them to examine...

Asking for animal shelter donations instead of presents for his 11th birthday was “no biggie” for Mac Gandy, but it makes him a hero to the Florence Area Humane Society. Mac decided after a visit to the shelter in early July, a couple of weeks before his birthday, that he wanted to help the animals in need of a good home. “I felt bad for them,” he said after he and his mother, Michelle Gandy, delivered the food, cleaning supplies and other items he’d collected. “It always tugs at his heart,” his mother said. The Gandys aren’t sure exactly how...

Asking for animal shelter donations instead of presents for his 11th birthday was “no biggie” for Mac Gandy, but it makes him a hero to the Florence Area Humane Society. Mac decided after a visit to the shelter in early July, a couple of weeks before his birthday, that he wanted to help the animals in need of a good home. “I felt bad for them,” he said after he and his mother, Michelle Gandy, delivered the food, cleaning supplies and other items he’d collected. “It always tugs at his heart,” his mother said. The Gandys aren’t sure exactly how...

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote of the great elephants of India, who, although they have the physical capacity to uproot trees during the day, can be restrained all night long by a piece of twine and a twig. How is this possible? The elephant’s training begins when it is still young and considerably less powerful. Removed from its mother, the elephant is then shackled with an iron chain to a large tree. For days and weeks on end, the baby elephant strains against its restraints, only to find that all exertion is useless. Then slowly, over a...

The trained elephant of India is a perfect picture of the power of psychological captivity. Tamed and utilized for its enormous strength, the great beast stands nearly 10 feet tall and weighs up to 5 tons when fully grown. Its tasks may include uprooting full-grown trees, hauling great boulders, and carrying enormous loads on its shoulders. And yet, when the day’s work is done and this powerful beast must be kept from wandering off during the night, its owner simply takes a piece of twine, attaches it to a small branch embedded in the ground, and ties it around the...

BOSTON (Reuters) - The mayor of a Massachusetts city that drew attention for a spike in teenage pregnancies denied on Monday a media report that a group of girls entered a pact to become pregnant. "I am not able to confirm the existence of a pact," Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk told reporters after meeting with local school and health officials to discuss a June 18 Time magazine report about teenagers who entered a pact to get pregnant and raise babies together. "Any planned blood-oath bond to become pregnant, there is absolutely no evidence of," she added, blaming a rise in...

When a 15-year-old at Gloucester HS in Massachusetts learned she was pregnant a few months ago, there were no tears. Shown her positive pregnancy test, the girl said simply, "Sweet!" And she rushed off to tell her classmates - 17 of whom are also pregnant, none of them older than 16. The baby boom is the result of what the school principal described last week as a "pregnancy pact." "Some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," principal Joseph Sullivan said. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy."

WASHINGTON, — Sexual activity is on the rise among U.S. teens while their use of contraceptives is sliding in the other direction, according to a study released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Click here to view the study.Approximately 48 percent of 14,041 high school students said they have had sex, representing a 2 percent hike since 2005; however, teens still are having less sex today than their counterparts did in the 1990s. The 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System study showed a 2 percent drop-off in the percentage of teens who said they used condoms...

US teens are having less sex, doing fewer drugs and smoking fewer cigarettes than those who grew up in the 1990s, a study released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found. They are also more likely to use condoms when they do have sex, wear a seat belt and avoid getting into a car with a driver who's been drinking, the national study of youth risk behavior found.

Does one of every four American teenagers really have a sexually transmitted disease? No, despite headlines given to a recent federal study. On March 11, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. This eye-opening statistic landed like a dead rat on the doorsteps of America’s 37 million households and 30 million teenagers. The New York Times, among other papers, put the news on the front page. CBS news anchor Katie Couric told her viewers that “at least one in four teenage girls in America has a sexually transmitted...

Diane Peterson works as a sales clerk at a Walgreens in Fenton. She was developing pictures last month when she spotted some familiar faces — teenage girls she has known since they were in kindergarten — in an X-rated spring break adventure. "I was appalled by what I saw," Peterson said. It wasn't just the drunken, sexual poses that bothered her. She knew some of their parents. And she knew they didn't have a clue. A recent poll commissioned by the cable network WE, which launched a docu-series called "High School Confidential," found a major communication gap between parents and...

The teens call their public orgies ponceo. On a typical Friday afternoon in the Chilean capital of Santiago, hundreds gather in a leafy urban park for a few hours of sexual experimentation. Surrounded by passing strollers, they trade partners multiple times—mostly engaging in anonymous rounds of oral sex. When the party is over, no contact information is exchanged. Same-gender interactions are commonplace, as the lines between hetero- and homosexuality are blurred, partly by the alcohol and drugs consumed, but also by shifting social mores held by Chilean youth, in contrast to their conservative parents. "Ponceo is about having fun," says...

Ashley Qualls doesn't sound like a typical high school student. Maybe that's because the 17-year-old is the CEO of a million-dollar business. Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Now, just three years later, the website grosses more than $1 million a year, providing Ashley and her working class family a sense of security they had never really known. It all started with capitalism 101, the law of supply and demand. Ashley became interested in graphic design just as the online social networking craze...

BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. -- The State Attorney's Office will decide whether to charge two teens who admit they robbed a 9-year-old Girl Scout selling cookies outside of a Boynton Beach supermarket. "I thought that it was a really mean thing to do, and I was sad after," Girl Scout Gracie Smith told WPBF News 25. Authorities said that a 17-year-old girl in a hot-pink sweatshirt approached Smith outside of a Winn-Dixie supermarket at Hypoluxo and Jog roads in Boynton Beach Wednesday evening and asked the girl what her favorite cookies were. Police told WPBF that, while Smith was telling the...

LifeNews.com Note: Maria Vitale is the education director for the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation and a former LifeNews.com staff writer.7th and 8th graders say the most remarkable things. That truth is being born out through some of the entries to the 2008 Pennsylvania Pro-Life Essay contest.Students at St. Francis Xavier school in Gettysburg recently submitted their essays for the contest, which ends March 1st. Some of their insights are truly amazing.Consider this analogy from a young man named Anthony:"Just picture someone in your life that you could not love any more than you do now. Picture that person leaving their...

My sons are both in high school and are under the common teenage misconception that they are liberals. They parrot what they hear from their teachers, their friends at school, and their father from my first marriage. They don’t necessarily want to engage me in debate about my conservative beliefs. They just want to tell me I’m wrong and that I don’t know of what I speak. When I provide an explanation for my observations or present facts for why something occurs in our government, they don’t listen. It’s almost as though they stick their fingers in their ears and...

SACRAMENTO -- Having already laid down the law for his two teenage daughters, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation Thursday that will prohibit the rest of Californians under age 18 from using cellphones, text message devices and laptop computers while driving. Read more at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-me-cellphones14sep14,1,4297013.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Middle-class teenagers made 'whipping boys' By Graeme Paton, Education Correspondent Last Updated: 10:33pm BST 31/07/2007 Middle-class teenagers are being turned into "whipping boys" as ministers discriminate against them in favour of students from poor homes, teachers warned. Education is being "dumbed down" as universities turn their attention towards easy subjects like surfing studies, beauty therapy and knitwear to attract more working-class students, it is claimed. In a fierce attack, the Professional Association of Teachers called for the Government to halt its drive towards so-called "social engineering". The comments come amid controversy over policies designed to increase the number of university...

Recent books and studies seem to indicate disturbing sexual trends among evangelical Christians. And this time we're not talking about their pastors or political leaders. The new attention is on evangelical teenagers, who reportedly start sex earlier than their mainline Protestant peers. One gleeful headline on an Internet site recently read: "Evangelical Girls Are Easy." That is not the way I remember it.... ...When the statistics on teen sexuality are controlled for social and economic factors, conservative Protestant teens first have sex at about the same time as their peers -- the average is midway through their 16th year. That...

Online message boards, forums, and social networks aimed at teens frequently feature posts in which youngsters discuss drug and alcohol use and associated sexual encounters, according to a report by a drug and alcohol rehabilitation organization. The report by Caron Treatment Centers cited a survey of 10.3 million posts made by teenagers on popular sites such as Myspace.com, teenspot.com, and ym.com. Of these, 160,000 contained keywords that matched contemporary teenage slang vocabulary, catalogued by Caron. The report said that 80 percent of the highlighted posts refer to alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and LSD use. In posts related to marijuana use, teens...

Four teenagers were killed early Thursday morning when the stolen SUV they were in and a train collided. It happened in Baytown at Archer Road and Fleming around 3:30 a.m. According to the Harris County Sheriff's Office, six teenagers were in the stolen Jeep when the driver apparently did not see a Union Pacific train that had apparently been stalled on the tracks for some time. The SUV slammed into the tanker car at a high rate of speed and went under it into a ditch. Four people in the backseat, three girls and one boy ages 12 to 15,...

Teenage mood swing hormone found Kevin the teenager is one of the most famous stroppy teenagers Teenage mood swings are known to be down to hormones, but scientists claim they have identified the specific one that makes adolescents so volatile.A team from the State University of New York identified a hormone which normally acts to calm anxiety, but the effect is reversed in adolescence. Writing in Nature Neuroscience, the researchers say it may be possible to reverse the puberty effect. And they add the study should help parents and teachers understand teens. There is a biological basis for a...

Family-oriented activists and groups were alarmed last fall when WND reported that officials were considering using in their schools a sexually-explicit "how to be promiscuous" guide that condemned traditional values and promoted homosexuality and abortion to young girls. Their alarm eventually defeated that education agenda. But now the book is back. While that wave of grass-roots reaction against the publication put those school plans on indefinite hold in 2006, the book now is returning, with an announcement from St. Stephen's House Community Center in Toronto that the new edited and "corrected" version is available. The original product was called...

San Francisco.– Teenagers often suffer emotional consequences from having sex, even when it's "only" oral sex, a study published Monday suggests. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco found that up to one-half of the sexually active teenagers in their study said they'd ever felt "used," guilty or regretful after having sex. Though such feelings were less common among teens who'd only had oral sex, about one-third reported some type of negative consequence. Dr. Sonya S. Brady and Bonnie L. Halpern-Felsher report the findings in the journal Pediatrics. The study, according to the researchers, suggests that parents should be...

AN Americans For Truth SPECIAL REPORTHow Does a Teenager Get Started in Homosexual “Sex Work”? Just ask the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force…It’s about time that Christian Americans learn to distinguish between the man or woman struggling with homosexual temptations–to whom we should extend a loving hand and God’s grace to help them overcome–and a “gay” activist movement bent on destroying all sexual and gender norms in the culture.Last month, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force held its 2006 Creating Change conference at the Westin Crown Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. Americans For Truth sent reporters to the...

Vietnamese wave as the motorcade of U.S. President George W. Bush makes its way through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Monday, Nov. 20, 2006. (AP Photo/Nghat Le) Vietnamese onlookers react to the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush at Ho Chi Minh Museum in Ho Chi Monh City, Vietnam, Monday, Nov. 20, 2006. (AP Photo/David Longstreath) Vietnamese cheer U.S. President George W. Bush as he arrives the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange Monday, Nov. 20, 2006, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. (AP Photo/David Longstreath) U.S. first lady Laura Bush, left, and Janette Howard,...

The grainy high school dance video is lurid. A teenage boy dances behind his winter-formal date, hands on her hips, thrusting his pelvis against her while she hitches up her satiny gown and bends at the waist. Another couple dance facing each other, their bodies enmeshed and their hips gyrating in a frenzy. A boy approaches a third couple, nearly sandwiching the girl between himself and her partner. ADVERTISEMENT Teenagers call it "freaking," a style of dance made popular on MTV. Educators call it "simulated sex" that has no place at school dances. This clash between outraged adults and sexualized...

Linda Harvey is the Founder and President of Mission America, which focuses on homosexuality and its destructive impact on youth.  Linda told LifeSiteNews.com she is a convert to Christianity and left her former life as a ‘liberal’ during which she was even a volunteer for Planned Parenthood. This message is primarily directed to Christian familiies and youth and is given from the perspective of a believer in traditional, authentic Christian moral and spiritual principles.It may already be too late. As students return to school this fall, we are sadly reminded that the campaign to normalize homosexuality in their minds continues...

Family photos line the walls of Raynard Brown's tidy Orange home. A good home, his mother calls it, with two working parents who believed in the value of education and the power of after-school activities to keep kids from hunting down trouble. But Cynthia Brown found she couldn't compete with another, more seductive influence in her son's life, not when it grabbed him up so young, molding his behavior since the age of 11. That's when Raynard Brown first came home wearing the signature colors of the Bloods street gang. Over the next eight years, Brown rose to the rank...

I'm in the process of teaching my son to drive. We've logged many hours together already (and I have the gray hairs to prove it). How did you learn to drive? How did you teach your kids to drive? Ever have any close calls? When was your first accident? When did you let them drive alone? Share your stories and advice.

A couple of weeks ago Wake Forest University physicians described the first human recipients of a laboratory-grown organ. In the prestigious medical journal "The Lancet," Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, detailed a series of patients (children and teenagers) who received urinary bladders grown from their own cells. WHAAAAT? Did somebody say "laboratory organs?!" Yes. Perhaps like you, the first reaction of some who heard the news was, “why would anyone need a new bladder?” Well, many infants are born with congenital birth defects a very serous one is spina bifida (incomplete closure of the spine)....

Rosa Brooks: No Escaping Sexualization of Young Girls With JonBenet back in the headlines, it's hard for a parent to avoid paranoia. August 25, 2006 IT'S BEEN a good week for the media, and a bad week for parents. The arrest of former schoolteacher John Mark Karr in the slaying of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey launched a flurry of excited stories about pedophiles, child abduction and murder. The cable news stations could hardly hide their glee, and even the New York Times joined in. In a two-part series on pedophilia, the newspaper reported that many pedophiles now use Internet...

WORTHINGTON, Ohio Aug 24, 2006 (AP)— Someone shot at a carload of teenage girls, critically wounding one of them, after some of them had stepped near a house that had been rumored by fellow students to be haunted, police said. A man who lives in the house, Allen S. Davis, was arrested Wednesday in the shooting of 17-year-old Rachel Barezinsky the night before. He told reporters Wednesday from jail that he was trying to drive off trespassers and didn't intend to hurt the girls. Barezinsky remained in critical condition Thursday at Ohio State University Medical Center, a nursing supervisor said....