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  • US School Violence Fast Facts | CNN

    US School Violence Fast Facts | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Here is a list of incidents of elementary, middle and high school violence with at least one fatality, from 1927 to the present. Suicides, gang-related incidents and deaths resulting from domestic conflicts are not included. If a perpetrator was killed or died by suicide during the incident, their death is not included in the fatality totals.

    Because there is no central database tracking school violence incidents, this list is based primarily on media reports and is not complete or representative of all incidents.

    READ MORE: Ten years of school shootings

    January 4, 2024 – Perry High School – Perry, Iowa. Dylan Butler, 17, fatally shoots a sixth grade student and wounds five other people. The wounded include four students and the school’s principal. Butler dies from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    March 27, 2023 – Covenant School – Nashville, Tennessee. Three children and three adults are killed in a shooting. The shooter is fatally shot by responding officers.

    November 8, 2022 – Ingraham High School – Seattle, Washington. A 17-year-old student is fatally shot, and two teens are arrested in connection with the shooting.

    October 24, 2022 – Central Visual and Performing Arts High School – St. Louis, Missouri. A teen and an adult are killed in a shooting. The gunman dies after an exchange of gunfire with police.

    May 24, 2022 – Robb Elementary School – Uvalde, Texas. Salvador Ramos, 18, fatally shoots 19 students and two teachers. Responding officers fatally shoot Ramos.

    March 31, 2022 – Tanglewood Middle School – Greenville, South Carolina. 12-year-old student Jamari Cortez Bonaparte Jackson is fatally shot. The suspected shooter, also 12, is arrested and charged with murder and other firearm charges.

    January 29, 2022 – Beloit Memorial High School – Beloit, Wisconsin. Jion Broomfield, 19, is fatally shot after a basketball game. Amaree Goodall, 19, is arrested in connection with the shooting.

    January 19, 2022 – Oliver Citywide Academy – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 15-year-old freshman Marquis Campbell is shot on school grounds. Campbell is taken to the hospital in critical condition and dies from gun injuries. In January 2024, Eugene Watson, 19, is sentenced to 20-40 years in prison.

    November 30, 2021 – Oxford High School – Oxford, Michigan. Ethan Crumbley, 15, opens fire, killing four students and injuring seven others. Crumbley later pleads guilty to one count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first-degree murder and 19 other charges. In 2023, Crumbley is sentenced to life in prison without parole.

    September 1, 2021 – Mount Tabor High School – Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A student is fatally shot, and a suspect is taken into custody.

    March 1, 2021 – Watson Chapel Junior High – Pine Bluff, Arkansas. A student is fatally shot, and a 15-year-old male suspect is arrested. In 2023, Thomas Quarles pleads guilty to murder and is sentenced to 40 years in prison.

    January 14, 2020 – Bellaire High School – Bellaire, Texas. A 16-year-old male fatally shoots classmate Cesar Cortes. The teen is arrested and charged with manslaughter. The county district attorney said it appeared the shooting was unintentional. In 2021, the teen is sentenced to twelve years in prison, according to authorities.

    November 14, 2019 – Saugus High School – Santa Clarita, California. Nathaniel Berhow, 16, opens fire, killing two and injuring three, then shoots himself.

    May 6, 2019 – STEM School Highlands Ranch – Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Suspects Devon Erickson, 18, and Alec McKinney, 16, are apprehended after a shooting leaves one dead and eight others injured. Erickson is later sentenced to life in prison without parole while McKinney is sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

    May 18, 2018 – Santa Fe High School – Santa Fe, Texas. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, allegedly opens fire killing 10 and injuring 13. Pagourtzis is arrested and charged with capital murder and aggravated assault of a public servant. In November 2019, he is declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.

    February 14, 2018 – Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – Parkland, Florida. Former student, Nikolas Cruz, 19, opens fire with an AR-15 rifle, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. According to law enforcement, the suspect activated a fire alarm to draw people outside to increase casualties. Cruz pleads guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Cruz is later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

    January 23, 2018 – Marshall County High School – Benton, Kentucky. Gabriel R. Parker, 15, opens fire killing two and injuring 18 others. The suspect is arrested at the scene and later charged with two counts of murder and 14 counts of first degree assault. Parker is later sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty.

    December 7, 2017 – Aztec High School – Aztec, New Mexico. William Atchison shoots and kills students Casey Jordan Marquez and Francisco Fernandez. Atchison, a former student at the high school, dies of what police believe to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    September 13, 2017 – Freeman High School – Spokane, Washington. Caleb Sharpe, a sophomore at the school, opens fire killing one student and injuring three others. Sharpe later pleads guilty and is sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.

    April 10, 2017 – North Park Elementary School – San Bernardino, California. Jonathan Martinez, 8, and his teacher, Karen Smith, are killed when Cedric Anderson, Smith’s estranged husband, walks into her special needs classroom and opens fire, armed with a large-caliber revolver. Two other students are wounded. Anderson then kills himself.

    September 28, 2016 – Townville Elementary School – Greenville, South Carolina. A 14-year-old male opens fire on the playground, wounding two children and a teacher. Jacob Hall, one of the wounded children, dies three days later. Before going to the school, the teen, later identified as Jesse Osborne, shot and killed his father. In December 2018, Osborne pleads guilty to two murder charges and three attempted murder charges. In November 2019, Osborne is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, plus 30 years.

    October 24, 2014 – Marysville-Pilchuck High School – Marysville, Washington. Freshman Jaylen Fryberg shoots five people in the school cafeteria, killing one. Fryberg dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the scene. A second victim dies of her injuries two days later; a third dies on October 31. A fourth victim dies on November 7.

    June 10, 2014 – Reynolds High School – Troutdale, Oregon. Jared Padgett, 15, shoots and kills 14-year-old Emilio Hoffman in the school gym. He later takes his own life.

    December 13, 2013 – Arapahoe High School – Centennial, Colorado. Karl Pierson, 18, opens fire inside, critically injuring one student and then killing himself. 17-year-old Claire Davis dies on December 21, eight days after being shot.

    October 21, 2013 – Sparks Middle School – Sparks, Nevada. 12-year-old student Jose Reyes takes his parent’s handgun to school and shoots three, injuring two 12-year-old male students and killing Mike Landsberry, a teacher and Marine veteran. He then kills himself.

    December 14, 2012 – Sandy Hook Elementary School – Newtown, Connecticut. Adam Lanza, 20, guns down 20 children, ages 6 and 7, and six adults, school staff and faculty, before turning the gun on himself. Investigating police later find Nancy Lanza, Adam’s mother, dead from a gunshot wound. The final count is 27 dead.

    February 27, 2012 – Chardon High School – Chardon, Ohio. Student Daniel Parmertor, 16, is killed and four others wounded when student T.J. Lane, 17, opens fire in the school. On February 28, Demetrius Hewlin, 16, dies from his wounds and Russell King Jr., 17, is declared brain dead. In March 2013, Lane is sentenced to life in prison. On September 11, 2014, Lane escapes from prison. He is captured early the next morning.

    January 5, 2011 – Millard South High School – Omaha, Nebraska. 17-year-old Robert Butler Jr. opens fire on Principal Curtis Case and Vice Principal Vicki Kasper. Butler then kills himself about a mile from the school. Vice Principal Kasper later dies at the hospital.

    February 5, 2010 – Discovery Middle School – Madison, Alabama. 14-year-old Todd Brown dies after being shot in the head in a school hallway. Fellow ninth-grader Hammad Memon later pleads guilty and is sentenced to 30 years in prison.

    October 16, 2009 – Carolina Forest High School – Conway, South Carolina. 16-year-old student Trevor Varinecz is shot and killed by a police officer after allegedly pulling a knife and stabbing the officer.

    September 23, 2009 – John Tyler High School – Tyler, Texas. A 16-year-old, Byron Truvia, is taken into custody for stabbing and killing high school teacher Todd R. Henry. Truvia is later found unfit to stand trial.

    September 15, 2009 – Coral Gables Senior High School – Coral Gables, Florida. 17-year-old Andy Jesus Rodriguez fatally stabs 17-year-old sophomore Juan Carlos Rivera during a fight. Rodriguez is later sentenced to 40 years in prison.

    August 21, 2008 – Central High School – Knoxville, Tennessee. 15-year-old Jamar Siler shoots and kills 15-year-old Ryan McDonald. In 2011, Siler receives 30 years in prison in a plea agreement.

    January 3, 2007 – Henry Foss High School – Tacoma, Washington. Student Douglas Chanthabouly, 18, fatally shoots another student, Samnang Kok, 17. Chanthabouly is sentenced in 2009 to more than 23 years in prison for second-degree murder.

    October 2, 2006 – West Nickel Mines Amish School – Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. 32-year-old Charles Roberts IV goes to a small Amish school and takes at least 11 girls hostage. Five girls were killed and six others wounded. Roberts then kills himself.

    September 29, 2006 – Weston High School – Cazenovia, Wisconsin. 15-year-old Eric Hainstock goes to school armed with a shotgun and a handgun. After a struggle with the school janitor, Hainstock shoots and kills the school principal. He is convicted of murder in August 2007 and sentenced to life in prison.

    September 27, 2006 – Platte Canyon High School – Bailey, Colorado. 54-year-old Duane Morrison takes six female students hostage. When SWAT teams enter the school, Morrison shoots 16-year-old Emily Keyes. Morrison then kills himself. Keyes later dies at the hospital.

    November 8, 2005 – Campbell County Comprehensive High School – Jacksboro, Tennessee. 15-year-old Kenneth Bartley Jr. opens fire on a principal and two assistant principals, killing one of them and critically wounding another, authorities said. In 2007, Bartley accepts a plea bargain, but his guilty plea is later vacated. In a retrial in February 2014, Bartley is found guilty of reckless homicide and not guilty of attempted first degree murder. He is sentenced to time served and released.

    March 21, 2005 – Red Lake High School – Red Lake, Minnesota. 16-year-old Jeff Weise kills his grandfather and another adult, five students, a teacher and a security officer. He then kills himself.

    February 3, 2004 – Southwood Middle School – Palmetto Bay, Florida. 14-year-old Michael Hernandez stabs to death 14-year-old Jaime Rodrigo Gough. In 2013, an appeals court tosses Hernandez’s life sentence and remands the case for re-sentencing. In 2016, Hernandez is again sentenced to life in prison.

    September 24, 2003 – Rocori High School – Cold Spring, Minnesota. 15-year-old Jason McLaughlin shoots and kills 17-year-old Aaron Rollins and critically injures another student. The second student dies in October. In 2005, McLaughlin is sentenced to consecutive terms of life in prison for first-degree murder and 12 years for second-degree murder.

    April 24, 2003 – Red Lion Area Junior High School – Red Lion, Pennsylvania. 14-year-old James Sheets brings a revolver to school and kills his principal, Eugene Segro, and then himself.

    December 5, 2001 – Springfield High School – Springfield, Massachusetts. At a high school for troubled teens, 17-year-old Corey Ramos stabs to death Reverend Theodore Brown, a counselor at the school. In 2003, Ramos is sentenced to life in prison.

    March 5, 2001 – Santana High School – Santee, California. 15-year-old Charles “Andy” Williams kills two classmates, a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old, and injures 13. Williams is sentenced in 2002 to at least 50 years in prison.

    May 26, 2000 – Lake Worth Community Middle School – Lake Worth, Florida. 13-year-old Nathaniel Brazill, after being sent home for misbehaving, returns to school and shoots and kills his teacher Barry Grunow. Brazill is sentenced to 28 years in prison.

    February 29, 2000 – Buell Elementary School – Mount Morris Township, Michigan. An unnamed 6-year-old boy shoots and kills a 6-year-old playmate, Kayla Rolland, at school. He is removed from his mother’s custody and put up for adoption.

    November 19, 1999 – Deming Middle School – Deming, New Mexico. 12-year-old Victor Cordova shoots and kills a 13-year-old classmate. He is sentenced to two years in juvenile detention.

    April 20, 1999 – Columbine High School – Littleton, Colorado. 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold kill 12 fellow students and one teacher before dying by suicide in the school library.

    May 21, 1998 – Thurston High School – Springfield, Oregon. After killing his parents the previous day, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel returns to Thurston High armed with a rifle. He kills two students in the school cafeteria, a 16 and a 17-year-old. He is sentenced to 112 years in prison.

    April 24, 1998 – James Parker Middle School – Edinboro, Pennsylvania. 14-year-old Andrew Wurst shoots and kills science teacher John Gillette at a school dance. He is sentenced to serve between 30 and 60 years.

    March 24, 1998 – Westside Middle School – Jonesboro, Arkansas. 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson ambush fellow students and their teachers, killing five. Johnson is incarcerated in a youth facility and released on his 21st birthday, August 11, 2005. Golden is released on his 21st birthday, May 25, 2007.

    December 1, 1997 – Heath High School – West Paducah, Kentucky. 14-year-old Michael Carneal opens fire on a school prayer group, killing three girls, who were 14, 15 and 17. He is serving life in prison.

    October 1, 1997 – Pearl High School – Pearl, Mississippi. After killing his mother at home, 16-year-old Luke Woodham arrives at school and shoots two classmates. Woodham is serving three life sentences plus 140 years.

    February 19, 1997 – Bethel High School – Bethel, Alaska. 16-year-old Evan Ramsey uses a shotgun stolen from his foster home to kill a 15-year-old student and the school principal. He is currently serving a term of 210 years.

    September 25, 1996 – Dekalb Alternative School – Decatur, Georgia. 16-year-old David Dubose Jr. shoots and kills English teacher Horace Morgan on the steps of the school. Dubose is found not guilty by reason of insanity and is committed indefinitely to a state mental hospital.

    February 2, 1996 – Frontier Junior High School – Moses Lake, Washington. 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis takes a rifle to school and kills two classmates and a teacher. He is sentenced to life in prison.

    January 19, 1996 – Winston Education Center – Washington. Two masked gunmen kill 14-year-old Damion Blocker in a stairwell. 16-year-old shooter Darrick Evans is given a sentence of 41 years to life in prison.

    November 15, 1995 – Richland High School – Lynnville, Tennessee. 17-year-old Jamie Rouse kills a business teacher and a 16-year-old student. Rouse is serving a life sentence.

    October 12, 1995 – Blackville-Hilda High School – Blackville, South Carolina. 15-year-old Toby Sincino kills a teacher and then himself.

    November 7, 1994 – Wickliffe Middle School – Wickliffe, Ohio. 37-year-old drifter Keith Ledeger shoots and kills school custodian Peter Christopher and injures three others. Ledeger is sentenced to life in prison.

    April 12, 1994 – Margaret Leary Elementary School – Butte, Montana. 10-year-old James Osmanson, teased because his parents have AIDS, shoots and kills an 11-year-old on the school playground. Osmanson is sent to a private residential treatment center.

    February 1, 1994 – Valley View Junior High School – Simi Valley, California. 13-year-old Philip Hernandez stabs to death a 14-year-old student in a school hallway. Hernandez is sentenced to four years in a California Youth Authority prison.

    December 1, 1993 – Wauwatosa West High School – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. 21-year-old former student Leonard McDowell returns to his high school and kills Associate Principal Dale Breitlow. He is sentenced to life in prison.

    May 24, 1993 – Upper Perkiomen High School – Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. 15-year-old student Jason Smith kills another student who had bullied him. He is sentenced to between 12 and 25 years in prison.

    April 15, 1993 – Ford Middle School – Acushnet, Massachusetts. 44-year-old David Taber invades a middle school and takes three hostages. He later shoots and kills school nurse Carol Day. He is found not guilty of the murder by reason of insanity.

    April 12, 1993 – Dartmouth High School – Dartmouth, Massachusetts. 16-year-old Jason Robinson is stabbed to death in his social studies class by three teenage attackers who invade the classroom.

    January 18, 1993 – East Carter High School – Grayson, Kentucky. 17-year-old student Scott Pennington shoots and kills a teacher and custodian. He is sentenced to life in prison.

    May 1, 1992 – Lindhurst High School – Olivehurst, California. 20-year-old dropout Eric Houston returns to his high school and kills a former teacher and three students. Houston is sentenced to death.

    February 26, 1992 – Thomas Jefferson High School – Brooklyn, New York. A 15-year-old shoots and kills two other students. The shooter, Kahlil Sumpter, is sentenced in 1993 to between 6 2/3 and 20 years in prison and is released in 1998.

    November 25, 1991 – Thomas Jefferson High School – Brooklyn, New York. A stray bullet kills a 16-year-old student during an argument between two other teens. Shooter Jason Bentley, 14, is sentenced in 1992 to three to nine years in prison.

    January 17, 1989 – Cleveland Elementary School – Stockton, California. 24-year-old drifter Patrick Purdy uses an AK-47 to kill five children on an elementary school playground. He then takes his own life.

    December 16, 1988 – Atlantic Shores Christian School – Virginia Beach, Virginia. 16-year-old Nicholas Elliot shoots and kills teacher Karen Farley. Elliott is sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

    September 26, 1988 – Oakland Elementary School – Greenwood, South Carolina. 19-year-old James Wilson, copying the Winnetka, Illinois murders, kills 8-year-olds Tequila Thomas and Shequila Bradley in their school cafeteria. Wilson’s death sentence is overturned in January 2003.

    May 20, 1988 – Hubbard Woods Elementary School – Winnetka, Illinois. 30-year-old Laurie Dann invades an elementary school and kills an 8-year-old boy. She injures six other people before taking her own life.

    February 11, 1988 – Pinellas Park High School – Largo, Florida. Two 15-year-olds with stolen weapons, Jason McCoy and Jason Harless, shoot and kill Assistant Principal Richard Allen. McCoy serves two years in prison, and Harless serves eight.

    March 2, 1987 – Dekalb High School – Dekalb, Missouri. 12-year-old Nathan Faris, who was teased about being overweight, shoots 13-year-old Timothy Perrin and then takes his own life.

    December 4, 1986 – Fergus High School – Lewistown, Montana. 14-year-old Kristofer Hans shoots and kills substitute teacher Henrietta Smith. He is sentenced to 206 years in prison in 1988.

    May 16, 1986 – Cokeville Elementary School – Cokeville, Wyoming. A couple in their 40s, David and Doris Young, take over an elementary school with a bomb and hold 150 children and adults hostage, demanding $300 million in ransom. The bomb accidentally detonates, setting the school on fire. Investigators later determine that during the fire David Young shot his wife and then killed himself. 74 people were injured in the fire.

    January 21, 1985 – Goddard Junior High School – Goddard, Kansas. 14-year-old James Kearbey shoots and kills Principal Jim McGee. Kearbey spends seven years in juvenile detention and is released at the age of 21. On October 31, 2001, Kearbey is involved in a six-hour standoff with Wichita, Kansas, police. No injuries resulted and Kearbey is later acquitted of aggravated assault on a police officer.

    February 24, 1984 – 49th Street School – Los Angeles. Sniper Tyrone Mitchell shoots at children on an elementary school playground, killing one and injuring 11. He later takes his own life.

    January 20, 1983 – Parkway South Junior High – St. Louis. An unnamed 14-year-old shoots and kills another student before turning the gun on himself.

    March 19, 1982 – Valley High School – Las Vegas. 17-year-old Pat Lizotte shoots and kills psychology teacher Clarence Piggott during class. Lizotte is sentenced to life in prison.

    January 29, 1979 – Grover Cleveland Elementary – San Diego. 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opens fire on a school across from her home, killing the principal and janitor.

    May 18, 1978 – Murchison Junior High School – Austin, Texas. 13-year-old John Christian shoots and kills his English teacher Wilbur Grayson, during class. The shooter is the son of George Christian, press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson from 1967 to 1969. After time in a psychiatric hospital, Christian attends high school in the Dallas area.

    February 22, 1978 – Everett High School – Lansing, Michigan. 15-year-old Roger Needham kills another student who had bullied him. After four years in juvenile detention, Needham is released. He later earns a Ph.D in math and works as a professor in Missouri and New York.

    March 18, 1975 – Sumner High School – St. Louis. 16-year-old Stephen Goods, a bystander, is shot and killed during a fight between other teens.

    December 30, 1974 – Olean High School – Olean, New York. Honors student Anthony Barbaro kills a school janitor and two passers-by. Barbaro later kills himself while awaiting trial.

    October 5, 1966 – Grand Rapids High School – Grand Rapids, Minnesota. 15-year-old David Black injures another student before killing teacher Forrest Willey.

    September 15, 1959 – Edgar Allen Poe Elementary – Houston. Convict Paul Orgeron explodes a suitcase of dynamite on a school playground, killing himself, two adults and three children.

    May 18, 1927 – Bath Consolidated Schoolhouse – Bath, Michigan. Farmer Andrew Kehoe sets off two explosions at the school, killing himself, six adults and 38 children.



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  • 'Tis the season for family holiday projects and gifts that give back | CNN

    'Tis the season for family holiday projects and gifts that give back | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Whether you’re hoping to do something more meaningful with your kids than just hitting the mall, or if you’re just looking for some gifts that give back, here are some ideas that could bring more joy this holiday season.

    Gathering friends or family together to assemble a gift box for a needy recipient could be a new, purposeful holiday tradition that you start this year.

    Kynd Kits are an activity for the whole family. You choose a cause or group of people important to you, and then request the corresponding kit.

    Each kit will contain items specifically requested by people in those groups. You assemble the pieces together, write a card, then send it off. Among the recipients you can choose from this year: the homeless, victims of domestic violence, senior citizens, LGBTQ people and foster children.

    If your family would like to help a foster child this holiday season, Together We Rise is helping kids without permanent homes by providing colorful bags to tote their items around in. (Many foster kids lug their worldly possessions around in trash bags.) They send you a panel to decorate, that you then send back. They attach each artwork panel to a duffel bag, which is stuffed with a teddy bear, a blanket, a hygiene kit and a coloring book.

    A family art project can brighten up the walls of a long-term care facility. The Foundation for Hospital Art will send you a kit, complete with pre-drawn canvases and art supplies. You color it in, create one panel of your own design and send it back with the pre-addressed UPS label.

    If you can knit or crochet, consider helping Knots of Love. You could knit a beanie to support a patient going through chemotherapy or a blanket to warm a baby in the NICU.

    The Salvation Army’s “Angel Tree” program is online again this year, making it easy to shop for a child in need. Just enter your zip code, add the requested items from their registry to your cart, and the Salvation Army does the rest.

    For your caffeine-loving friends, why not send them bird-friendly coffee? These coffee beans are grown under a forest canopy that provides a habitat for birds – important since the North American bird population has decreased by almost three billion birds since 1970.

    And if you want to spend your money at a local bookstore but don’t want to leave the house, consider buying from bookshop.org. They partner with independent book sellers across the country to send your dollars to stores that really need it.

    If you want to support Black-owned businesses this Christmas (or any time of year) the website and app https://www.supportblackowned.com/ helps you find shops and services all over the US.

    The EatOkra app helps you find Black-owned restaurants and food services (buying a gift card helps keep small eateries in business).

    You can also search Instagram by using the hashtag #SupportBlackBusiness.

    Finally, many larger retailers are giving back this season. If you just want a name-brand gift sure to wow a picky tween or teen, many stores and brands partner with charities to give back over the holiday season.

    Some companies even make it a yearlong mission to do good.

    If you are looking for a present for someone worried about the environment, Patagonia gives a portion of all profits to environmental causes.

    Ivory Ella donates up to 50% of its profits to charities helping elephants, including Save the Elephants.

    Sock company Bombas donates a pair of socks to a needy person, for every pair sold.

    And what Christmas stocking couldn’t use a fuzzy pencil case and some unicorn-themed erasers? Yoobi sells colorful pens, pencils and stationery, and for every item purchased, they donate a school supply to a child in need.

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  • Ultraprocessed foods now account for two-thirds of calories in the diets of children and teens | CNN

    Ultraprocessed foods now account for two-thirds of calories in the diets of children and teens | CNN

    Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Eat, But Better: Mediterranean Style. Our eight-part guide shows you a delicious expert-backed eating lifestyle that will boost your health for life.



    CNN
     — 

    Children and teens in the United States now get more than two-thirds of their calories from ultraprocessed foods, an analysis of almost two decades worth of data has found.

    Ultraprocessed foods – such as frozen pizza, microwave meals, packaged snacks and desserts – accounted for 67% of calories consumed in 2018, up from 61% in 1999, according to research published in the medical journal JAMA Tuesday. The study analyzed the diet of 33,795 children and adolescents nationwide.

    While industrial processing can keep food fresher longer and allow some foods to be fortified with vitamins, it modifies food to change its consistency, taste and color to make it more palatable, cheap and convenient – using processes that aren’t used in home-cooked meals. They are also aggressively marketed by the food industry.

    “Some whole grain breads and dairy foods are ultra-processed, and they’re healthier than other ultra-processed foods,” said senior author Fang Fang Zhang, a nutrition and cancer epidemiologist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston.

    “But many ultra-processed foods are less healthy, with more sugar and salt, and less fiber, than unprocessed and minimally processed foods, and the increase in their consumption by children and teenagers is concerning.”

    The information on children’s diets used in the study was collected annually by trained interviewers who asked the children or an adult acting on their behalf to detail what they had eaten in the preceding 24 hours. The information was gathered as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

    Between 1999 and 2018, the proportion of healthier unprocessed or minimally processed foods decreased from 28.8% to 23.5% of consumed calories, the study found.

    The remaining percentage of calories came from moderately processed foods such as cheese and canned fruits and vegetables, and flavor enhancers such as sugar, honey, maple syrup and butter, the study said.

    The biggest increase in calories came from ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat meals such as takeout and frozen pizza and burgers: from 2.2% to 11.2% of calories, according to the study. The second largest increase came from packaged sweet snacks and desserts, the consumption of which grew from 10.6% to 12.9%.

    The link between child health and ultraprocessed food is complex but one recent study in the United Kingdom found that children who eat more ultraprocessed food are more likely to be overweight or obese as adults.

    Experts said the study’s implications for future health were significant given that childhood is a critical period for biological development and forming dietary habits.

    “The current food system is structured to promote overconsumption of ultra-processed foods through a variety of strategies, including price and promotions, aggressive marketing, including to youths and specifically Black and Latino youths, and high availability of these products in schools,” wrote Katie Meyer and Lindsey Smith Taillie, both assistant professors in the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina’ Gillings School of Global Public Health, in a commentary on the study. They were not involved in the research.

    There was good news that suggested efforts to tackle consumption of sugary drinks such as soda taxes had been effective: Calories from sugar-sweetened beverages dropped from 10.8% to 5.3% of overall calories.

    “We need to mobilize the same energy and level of commitment when it comes to other unhealthy ultra-processed foods such as cakes, cookies, doughnuts and brownies,” said Zhang.

    Black, non-Hispanic youths experienced a bigger increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in their diet compared to their White counterparts. The study said it did not assess trends in other racial or ethnic groups because of a lack of nationally representative data. However, it noted that Mexican American youths consume ultraprocessed foods at a consistently lower rate, which authors said could reflect more home cooking among Hispanic families.

    The education level of parents or family income didn’t have any impact on the consumption of ultraprocessed foods, suggesting that they are commonplace in most children’s diets, the study added.

    The authors said their study had some limitations: Asking people to recall what they ate isn’t always an accurate measure of dietary intake. Plus, there is a tendency to under report socially undesirable habits such as consumption of unhealthy food.

    In addition, it can be a challenge to accurately classify ultraprocessed food because it requires a full list of ingredients – information unlikely to be given by children answering a questionnaire.

    “Better methods for dietary assessment and classification of foods are needed to understand trends and mechanisms of action of ultra-processed food intake,” Mayer and Taillie wrote.

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  • Don’t serve disordered eating to your teens this holiday season | CNN

    Don’t serve disordered eating to your teens this holiday season | CNN

    Editor’s Note: Katie Hurley, author of “No More Mean Girls: The Secret to Raising Strong, Confident and Compassionate Girls,” is a child and adolescent psychotherapist in Los Angeles. She specializes in work with tweens, teens and young adults.



    CNN
     — 

    “I have a couple of spots for anyone who wants to lose 20 pounds by the holidays! No diets, exercise, or cravings!”

    Ads for dieting and exercise programs like this started appearing in my social media feeds in early October 2022, often accompanied by photos of women pushing shopping carts full of Halloween candy intended to represent the weight they no longer carry with them.

    Whether it’s intermittent fasting or “cheat” days, diet culture is spreading wildly, and spiking in particular among young women and girls, a population group who might be at particular risk of social pressures and misinformation.

    The fact that diet culture all over social media targets grown women is bad enough, but such messaging also trickles down to tweens and teens. (And let’s be honest, a lot is aimed directly at young people too.) It couldn’t happen at a worse time: There’s been a noticeable spike in eating disorders, particularly among adolescent girls, since the beginning of the pandemic.

    “My mom is obsessed with (seeing) her Facebook friends losing tons of weight without dieting. Is this even real?” The question came from a teen girl who later revealed she was considering hiring a health coach to help her eat ‘healthier’ after watching her mom overhaul her diet. Sadly, the coaching she was falling victim to is part of a multilevel marketing brand that promotes quick weight loss through caloric restriction and buying costly meal replacements.

    Is it real? Yes. Is it healthy? Not likely, especially for a growing teen.

    Later that week, a different teen client asked about a clean eating movement she follows on Pinterest. She had read that a strict clean vegan diet is better for both her and the environment, and assumed this was true because the pinned article took her to a health coaching blog. It seemed legitimate. But a deep dive into the blogger’s credentials, however, showed that the clean eating practices they shared were not actually developed by a nutritionist.

    And another teen, fresh off a week of engaging in the “what I eat in a day” challenge — a video trend across TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms where users document the food they consume in a particular timeframe — told me she decided to temporarily mute her social media accounts. Why? Because the time she’d spent limited her eating while pretending to feel full left her exhausted and unhappy. She had found the trend on TikTok and thought it might help her create healthier eating habits, but ended up becoming fixated on caloric intake instead. Still, she didn’t want her friends to see that the challenge actually made her feel terrible when she had spent a whole week promoting it.

    During any given week, I field numerous questions from tweens and teens about the diet culture they encounter online, out in the world, and sometimes even in their own homes. But as we enter the winter holiday season, shame-based diet culture pressure, often wrapped up with toxic positivity to appear encouraging, increases.

    “As we approach the holidays, diet culture is in the air as much as lights and music, and it’s certainly on social media,” said Dr. Hina Talib, an adolescent medicine specialist and associate professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx, New York. “It’s so pervasive that even if it’s not targeted (at) teens, they are absorbing it by scrolling through it or hearing parents talk about it.”

    Social media isn’t the only place young people encounter harmful messaging about body image and weight loss. Teens are inundated with so-called ‘healthy eating’ content on TV and in popular culture, at school and while engaged in extracurricular or social activities, at home and in public spaces like malls or grocery stores — and even in restaurants.

    Instead of learning how to eat to fuel their bodies and their brains, today’s teens are getting the message that “clean eating,” to give just one example of a potentially problematic dietary trend, results in a better body — and, by extension, increased happiness. Diets cutting out all carbohydrates, dairy products, gluten, and meat-based proteins are popular among teens. Yet this mindset can trigger food anxiety, obsessive checking of food labels and dangerous calorie restriction.

    An obsessive focus on weight loss, toning muscles and improving overall looks actually runs contrary to what teens need to grow at a healthy pace.

    “Teens and tweens are growing into their adult bodies, and that growth requires weight gain,” said Oona Hanson, a parent coach based in Los Angeles. “Weight gain is not only normal but essential for health during adolescence.”

    The good news in all of this is that parents can take an active role in helping teens craft an emotionally healthier narrative around their eating habits. “Parents are often made to feel helpless in the face of TikTokers, peer pressure or wider diet culture, but it’s important to remember this: parents are influencers, too,” said Hanson. What we say and do matters to our teens.

    Parents can take an active role in helping teens craft an emotionally healthier narrative around their eating habits.

    Take a few moments to reflect on your own eating patterns. Teens tend to emulate what they see, even if they don’t talk about it.

    Parents and caregivers can model a healthy relationship with food by enjoying a wide variety of foods and trying new recipes for family meals. During the holiday season, when many celebrations can involve gathering around the table, take the opportunity to model shared connections. “Holidays are a great time to remember that foods nourish us in ways that could never be captured on a nutrition label,” Hanson said.

    Practice confronting unhealthy body talk

    The holiday season is full of opportunities to gather with friends and loved ones to celebrate and make memories, but these moments can be anxiety-producing when nutrition shaming occurs.

    When extended families gather for holiday celebrations, it’s common for people to comment on how others look or have changed since the last gathering. While this is usually done with good intentions, it can be awkward or upsetting to tweens and teens.

    “For young people going through puberty or body changes, it’s normal to be self-conscious or self-critical. To have someone say, ‘you’ve developed’ isn’t a welcome part of conversations,” cautioned Talib.

    Talib suggests practicing comebacks and topic changes ahead of time. Role play responses like, “We don’t talk about bodies,” or “We prefer to focus on all the things we’ve accomplished this year.” And be sure to check in and make space for your tween or teen to share and feelings of hurt and resentment over any such comments at an appropriate time.

    Open and honest communication is always the gold standard in helping tweens and teens work through the messaging and behaviors they internalize. When families talk about what they see and hear online, on podcasts, on TV, and in print, they normalize the process of engaging in critical thinking — and it can be a really great shared connection between parents and teens.

    “Teaching media literacy skills is a helpful way to frame the conversation,” says Talib. “Talk openly about it.”

    She suggests asking the following questions when discussing people’s messaging around diet culture:

    ● Who are they?

    ● What do you think their angle is?

    ● What do you think their message is?

    ● Are they a medical professional or are they trying to sell you something?

    ● Are they promoting a fitness program or a supplement that they are marketing?

    Talking to tweens and teens about this throughout the season — and at any time — brings a taboo topic to the forefront and makes it easier for your kids to share their inner thoughts with you.

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  • Why most men don’t have enough close friends | CNN

    Why most men don’t have enough close friends | CNN

    Sign up for CNN’s Stress, But Less newsletter. Our six-part mindfulness guide will inform and inspire you to reduce stress while learning how to harness it.



    CNN
     — 

    Friendships aren’t just about those you sit with on the school bus or play alongside on your childhood baseball team — they are a core component of the human experience, experts say.

    But making and retaining deep, meaningful friendships as an adult is hard, especially for men, according to research.

    Less than half of men report being satisfied with their friendships, and only about 1 in 5 said they had received emotional support from a friend in the last week, compared with 4 in 10 women, according to a 2021 survey from the Survey Center on American Life.

    The falling off of friendships between men begins around middle and late adolescence and grows starker in adulthood, said Judy Yi-Chung Chu, who teaches a class on boys’ psychological development at Stanford University. And those who do maintain friendships with other men say they tend to have lower levels of emotional intimacy than women report.

    “Boys don’t start emotionally disconnected; they become emotionally disconnected,” said Dr. Niobe Way, a researcher and a professor of applied psychology at New York University.

    All humans have the innate capacity and desire for close, emotionally intimate connections with others. We need these relationships for survival as babies and then to thrive as we get older, Chu said.

    Research has shown close friendships protect our mental and physical health, she added. And men who prioritize those relationships are fighting off one of the most harmful things to human health — loneliness, said Dr. Frank Sileo, a psychologist based in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

    “What (men) are at risk of losing is this sense of not being alone in the world or not being alone in their experience,” Sileo said. Research has shown “disclosure of emotional distress improved (men’s) emotional well-being, increased feelings of being understood and resulted in less reported loneliness,” he added.

    Just as many men strive to eat right, exercise, succeed in their careers and raise children, men should prioritize developing friendships as adults, he said.

    When Sileo first began conducting research on male friendships in 1995, many participants assumed his survey was about homosexuality, he said. Such stereotypes that male bonding would be, or become, sexual in nature are inaccurate but revealed some of what may be holding some men back from deep friendships, he added.

    Assumptions nearly 30 years later might be different, but social pressures remain that make it difficult for men to express the vulnerability and intimacy needed for close friendships, Sileo said.

    We are all born with two sides of ourselves: the hard side that is stoic and independent and the soft one that is vulnerable and interdependent, said Way, author of “Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection.”

    The hard side has been characterized as masculine and inherently preferable, and the soft side has been seen as feminine and lesser than, Way said.

    Boys receive messages that growing up and “manning up” mean shedding that soft side — a mindset that neuroscience, social science and developmental psychology all show is harmful to them, Way said.

    “We gender relationships as feminine,” Chu said. “If that’s a feminine thing, it becomes a weakness or a liability if (men) admit to needing friendships.”

    Characterizing the gender of these experiences has a clear impact, Sileo said. Men who were more emotionally restricted, focused on power and who scored high on surveys measuring homophobia are less likely to have intimate and close friendships, he said.

    And the drive to toughen up and never show vulnerability that restricts men from friendships can lead them to loneliness, violence and anger, Way said.

    “We live in a culture that clashes with our nature,” she said. “If we raise children to go against their nature, we shouldn’t be surprised if some of those children grow up to struggle.”

    Heterosexual men seeking closeness might turn to those they see as better at building relationships and feel comfortable exploring their vulnerability with: the women in their lives and their romantic partners, Way said.

    It may seem like a good solution, but it works neither for the men nor the women they look to, Sileo said.

    Putting everything on a romantic partner can strain a relationship, he said, whether it is going to a female partner exclusively for emotional support or depending on her to cultivate friendships and get-togethers for holidays and weekends.

    It is crucial to have multiple people to go to for support for different perspectives, Chu added.

    “(Men) need to know it’s not just a woman thing,” she said. “They need to know that men can do it, too.”

    Community is important, and keeping struggles, questions and concerns with one person or one relationship doesn’t always provide the best help to see them through, Way said.

    “A male partner thinks it’s betrayal to talk to another person,” Way said, “but the female partner is saying, ‘Please do it, please get other perspectives.’”

    If you are wishing you had close friendships or that the ones you have went deeper, experts say it’s OK to start small.

    You don’t even have to disclose your own vulnerabilities at first, Chu said.

    “A very powerful place to start is listening and asking real questions,” she said. “All people love when they can trust that this situation is safe and that someone is genuinely interested in them.”

    The key is to move beyond banter and general niceties and ask questions you find meaningful, such as what friends like about their jobs or what happens to their feelings after breakups, Way said. Don’t worry. It’s not rude to do so. Most people report wanting to be asked these questions, she said.

    Each relationship has its own rules and protocol, and it’s good to work within these, Sileo said. You might start asking something of a friend and find that person is hesitant to talk about it, Chu said. If this is the case, you can jump in and offer your own vulnerability by talking about how that topic might be bothering you or how you’ve been thinking about it.

    Sometimes the rules of the relationship might mean avoiding the vulnerability of sitting face-to-face, Sileo said.

    In those cases, find an activity such as the gym, work or a community project where you can connect side by side through a shared purpose, Sileo added.

    And if you need to build friendships from scratch, follow the lead of the women in your life and ask someone to grab coffee or a bite to eat, Way said.

    Putting in time, effort and intention is the key, Sileo said. Showing up and spending time is crucial to building those important friendships.

    “Quality counts here,” he said. “If you can have a handful of friends that are quality, that’s better than having a slew of friends.”

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  • Before he became a politician, House Speaker Mike Johnson partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group | CNN Politics

    Before he became a politician, House Speaker Mike Johnson partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Speaker of the House Mike Johnson closely collaborated with a group in the mid-to-late 2000s that promoted “conversion therapy,” a discredited practice that asserted it could change the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian individuals.

    Prior to launching his political career, Johnson, a lawyer, gave legal advice to an organization called Exodus International and partnered with the group to put on an annual anti-gay event aimed at teens, according to a CNN KFile review of more than a dozen of Johnson’s media appearances from that timespan.

    Founded in 1976, Exodus International was a leader in the so-called “ex-gay” movement, which aimed to make gay individuals straight through conversion therapy programs using religious and counseling methods. Exodus International connected ministries across the world using these controversial approaches.

    The group shut down in 2013, with its founder posting a public apology for the “pain and hurt” his organization caused. Conversion therapy has been widely condemned by most major medical institutions and has been shown to be harmful to struggling LGBTQ people.

    At the time, Johnson worked as an attorney for the socially conservative legal advocacy group, Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). He and his group collaborated with Exodus from 2006 to 2010.

    For years, Johnson and Exodus worked on an event started by ADF in 2005 known as the “Day of Truth” – a counterprotest to the “Day of Silence,” a day in schools in which students stayed silent to bring awareness to bullying faced by LGBTQ youth.

    The Day of Truth sought to counter that silence by distributing information about what Johnson described as the “dangerous” gay lifestyle.

    “I mean, our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and we cannot change,” Johnson told one radio host in 2008 promoting the event. “What these adult advocacy groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network are promoting is a type of behavior. Homosexual behavior is something you do, it’s not something that you are.”

    In print, radio and on television, Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, frequently disparaged homosexuality, according to KFile’s review. He advocated for the criminalization of gay sex and went so far as to partially blame it for the fall of the Roman Empire.

    “Some credit to the fall of Rome to not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008.

    Johnson’s office did not respond to a CNN request for comment asking about his work with Exodus.

    Exodus International joined ADF’s Day of Truth event in 2006 and the groups worked together on promotional material for the event, including a standalone website which pointed users to Exodus’ conversion ministries. Documents on that website cited the since-repudiated academic work in support of conversion therapy. Exodus Youth, the group’s youth wing, promoted the event within its blogs.

    Videos put out by Exodus and ADF on their standalone Day of Truth website featured two Exodus staffers speaking about how teens didn’t need to “accept” or “embrace” their homosexuality. The videos featured testimonials of a “former-homosexual” and “former lesbian.”

    Documents on the website were not archived online but were saved by anti-conversion therapy groups such as Truth Wins Out in 2007 and 2008. The website featured a FAQ on homosexuality provided by Exodus and sold t-shirts saying, “the Truth cannot be silenced.”

    One video featured Johnson, who was later quoted in a press release on Exodus International’s website ahead of the event, saying, “An open, honest discussion allows truth to rise to the surface.”

    Johnson promoted the event heavily in the media – through radio interviews, comments in newspapers, and an editorial. In interviews, he repeatedly cited the case of a teen who went to school after the Day of Silence wearing a shirt that read, “Be ashamed. Our school has embraced what God has condemned” and “Homosexuality is shameful.” The teen was suspended and ADF represented him in legal action over the incident. The case was dismissed because the teen graduated, and the court found he no longer had standing to challenge the dress code.

    “Day of Truth was really established to counter the promotion of the homosexual agenda in public schools,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008.

    Those who worked to counter ADF and Exodus at the time, said the event was dangerous to confused youth.

    “This directly harmed LGBTQ youth,” Wayne Besen, the executive director of Truth Wins Out and an expert on the ex-gay industry, told CNN. “This is someone whose core was promoting anti-gay and ex-gay viewpoints. He wouldn’t pander to anti-gay advocates, he was the anti-gay and ex-gay advocate.”

    Randy Scobey, a former executive vice president at Exodus, who worked on the Day of Truth in the organization’s collaboration with ADF, called the event one of his biggest regrets.

    “It was bullying those who were trying to not be bullied,” said Scobey, who now lives openly as a gay man. “That was one of the public ways that the Alliance Defense Fund worked with us.”

    Ties between Exodus and ADF extended beyond the event.

    ADF, which has since changed its name to the Alliance Defending Freedom, touted Exodus International in promotional brochures in 2004, crediting it as an organization that “played an instrumental role in helping thousands of individuals come out of homosexual behavior.”

    Scobey recalled Johnson as quiet, but firm in his beliefs that homosexuality was wrong. He said Johnson and ADF provided crucial legal advice to Exodus and its “member ministries.”

    “We worked with them behind the scenes a lot,” Scobey told CNN, saying the group offered them legal guidance over their ex-gay counseling. “They were very important to us as far as helping us to feel more secure legally and politically.”

    Exodus International stopped sponsoring the Day of Truth event in 2010, saying it became adversarial and counterproductive.

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  • Why teachers in South Korea are scared of their pupils — and their parents | CNN

    Why teachers in South Korea are scared of their pupils — and their parents | CNN

    Editor’s Note: Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 to connect with a trained counselor, or visit the 988 Lifeline website.


    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    When fighting broke out in Kang Hyeon-joo’s elementary school classroom, her heart would beat so fast she could not breathe and her vision would blur.

    “They were throwing punches and kicking faces, throwing chairs and tables around,” she recalled, adding she had been hurt trying to intervene.

    For two years, Kang struggled to discipline her students – or cope with the parental backlash when she did. She claims her principal did nothing to help and would tell her simply to “just take a week off”.

    The strain took a dangerous toll. Kang says she started feeling the urge to jump in front of a bus. “If I just jumped at least, I would feel some relief. If I just jumped off a tall building, that would at least give me some peace.”

    Kang is currently on sick leave but is far from alone in her experiences.

    Tens of thousands of teachers have been protesting in recent months, calling for more protection from students and parents. At one protest in Seoul last month, 200,000 gathered, according to organizers, forcing the government to take notice and action.

    The unified stand by the country’s teaching staff comes after the suicide of a first-grade teacher, in her early 20s, in July. She was found dead in her classroom in Seoul. Police have mentioned a problematic student and parental pressure while discussing her case, but have not given a definitive reason for her suicide.

    Several more teachers have taken their own lives since July and some of these cases have reportedly been linked to school stress, according to colleagues of the deceased and bereaved families.

    Government data shows 100 public school teachers killed themselves from January 2018 to June 2023, 11 of them in the first six months of this year, but does not specify what factors contributed to their deaths.

    Sung Youl-kwan, a professor of education at Kyung Hee University, says the speed and size of the protests took many by surprise. “I think there has been like a shared feeling that this can happen to me too,” he said.

    Teachers point to a 2014 child abuse law, intended to protect children, as one of the main reasons they feel unable to discipline students. They say they are fearful of being sued by a small percentage of parents for causing emotional distress to their child and being dragged through the courts.

    “School is the last barrier to let students know what is okay in society and what is not. But we couldn’t do anything, if we teach them, we could be accused,” said Ahn Ji-hye, an elementary school teacher who helped organize previous protests.

    Ahn says parents have called her mobile phone some days from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m., wanting to talk about their child or complain.

    Mourners lay flowers in front of a memorial altar for an elementary school teacher who died in an apparent suicide in July at an elementary school in Seoul on September 4, 2023.

    South Korea’s education minister Lee Ju-ho initially warned teachers that a mass strike would be an illegal act. That position was swiftly reversed, and a set of legal revisions passed the National Assembly on September 21, a fast piece of legislation.

    One of the key changes is providing teachers some protection from being sued for child abuse if their discipline is considered a legitimate educational activity. Also, the responsibility for handling school complaints and lawsuits brought by parents now rests with the principal.

    “So far we have a culture where the school principal tended to pass those responsibilities to teachers,” said Professor Sung.

    The new law will also protect teachers’ personal information, such as their mobile phone numbers, and require parents to contact the school with concerns or complaints rather than the teacher directly.

    In the past, Ahn said, “If I could not give my personal phone number to them, sometimes some parents would come to the parking lot and watch and see and take a note of my phone number from my car, then they would text message me.” It is customary for Koreans to display their phone number in the bottom corner of their windscreen.

    Ahn welcomes the legal changes as “meaningful,” but insists higher-level laws like the Child Welfare Act and Child Abuse Punishment Act also need to be revised. “It is still possible to report teachers based on suspicion alone according to these laws,” she said.

    She says that, for now at least, the protests will continue.

    One is planned for outside the National Assembly on October 28. Ahn says she would like to see penalties for parents who make unfounded accusations against teachers or practical measures put in place so that mandated changes can be adopted in classrooms, such as removing a disruptive student elsewhere to allow teaching to continue.

    Professor Sung believes the revisions will help in the short term, but cautions that the law should be seen as a safety net not a solution.

    South Korean teachers rally in front of the National Assembly in Seoul on September 4.

    Critics say South Korean society places a disproportionate level of importance on academic success so it should not be surprising that parents put teachers – and the wider education system – under so much pressure.

    It is the norm for students to attend a cram school, called hagwon, after their regular school hours, not as an extra but as a basic and expensive requirement to succeed.

    On the day of the national college entrance exam, known as Suneung in Korean, airplanes are grounded, and commuting hours are adjusted to ensure that students taking the exams are not disturbed.

    “We have a culture in which parents have usually one child and they are ready to pour every financial resource and opportunity into this child,” Sung said.

    “This pressure or obsession with education, sometimes with a high score, high achievement (mindset), is not a good environment for teachers (because) they are taking the pressure from the parents.”

    Mourners pass funeral wreaths in front of an elementary school in Seoul on September 4, following the apparent suicide of a teacher in July.

    Sung says the days of a teacher being automatically respected are long gone, not just in South Korea but elsewhere in the world, and the teacher-parent dynamic is unrecognizable from just a decade or two ago.

    “In educational policies, parents are regarded as like a consumer, with consumer sovereignty, and school and teachers are regarded as service providers”, he said, adding parents believe they “have the right to demand many things from schools.”

    In a country where education is considered central to success, teacher satisfaction is low. A survey by the Federation of Teachers’ Labor Union in April found 26.5% of teachers polled said they had received counseling or treatment for psychological issues due to their job. Some 87% said they have considered moving job or quitting in the past year.

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  • A nonprofit is racing to get its portable baby incubators into Israel and Gaza as crisis deepens | CNN Business

    A nonprofit is racing to get its portable baby incubators into Israel and Gaza as crisis deepens | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Jane Chen is racing against the clock, again. She knows well how every minute that passes is crucial for a new life that emerges prematurely into the world in the most vulnerable of circumstances — in the midst of war, in the aftermath of a natural disaster or in a remote village far away from a medical center.

    Acutely aware of the deepening crisis between Israel and Gaza, Chen is mobilizing her team at Embrace Global, a nonprofit she co-founded to help save babies’ lives, in a way that’s become second nature to her.

    Embrace, based in San Francisco, California, makes low-cost portable baby incubators that don’t require a stable electricity supply.

    The Embrace incubator resembles a sleeping bag, but for a baby. It’s a three-part system consisting of an infant sleeping bag, a removable and reusable pouch filled with a wax-like phase-change material which maintains a constant temperature of 98 degrees F for up to eight hours at a stretch when heated, and a heater to reheat the pouch when it cools.

    Chen said the pouch requires just a 30-minute charge to be fully ready for reuse. “This is really ideal for settings that have intermittent access to electricity, which is a lot of places where we work in the world,” she said.

    According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), an estimated 50,000 pregnant women currently reside in Gaza, 5,500 of whom are due to give birth in the coming month.

    The stats are startling to Chen, who is bracing for a swell of need there. She’s learned how access to incubators becomes critical in conflict areas through the organization’s efforts to donate 3,000 Embrace incubators with the help of UNICEF to doctors and hospitals in Ukraine where a war with Russia rages on. The nonprofit also sent the devices to Turkey and Syria after devastating earthquakes there earlier this year.

    Medical experts point to elevated stress as a potentially serious factor that could trigger preterm deliveries in these situations.

    “There’s been plenty of data that show stress not only causes preterm birth but also low-birth-weight,” said Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell, an obstetrician-gynecologist and associate professor with Ochsner Health in New Orleans, Louisiana

    In general, babies born preterm or before 37 weeks, have difficulty maintaining their body temperature, said Bell. “Specifically, if we are speaking of disasters…. in my own experience of being here during [Hurricane] Katrina, in those very stressful situations, we have seen an uptick during those times in preterm birth and low birth weight,” she said.

    Because preterm and low-birth-weight babies don’t have as much body fat, it’s harder for them to maintain their body temperature, which for a healthy baby is between 96.8 and 99.5 degrees F, she said. “The lower it is below that, the more oxygen and energy they need to stay warm. So they would have use even more energy.”

    In both cases of preterm and low-birth-weight infants, quick and constant access to an incubator is vital.

    In Ukraine, Chen said doctors have indicated that preterm births are on the rise across the country at the same time that intermittent power outages have made the use of conventional incubators very challenging. Several doctors and nurses, she said, also must consistently take babies and mothers to basement shelters as bombings continue.

    Dr. Halyna Masiura, a general practitioner, is experiencing this first hand at the Berezivka Primary Healthcare Center in the Odesa region of Ukraine.

    Embrace Global donated its incubators to hospitals in Ukraine through its partner Project HOPE, including to the Sumy Regional Perinatal center in Northeastern Ukraine in 2022. Seen here is a nurse at Sumy Perinatal center secures an infant into an Embrace incubator.

    “Half of the babies being born in this area need more care,” Masiura told CNN. “They are being born early and with low birth weight. When air raids happen, we all have to go into shelters.” Masiura said her staff members have been relying on donated Embrace incubators for babies born with a birth weight of 2 kg (4 lbs) and up.

    In the Palestinian exclave of Gaza, Israel has instructed more than half of the more than 2 million residents in the north to evacuate to the southern region ahead of an anticipated ground operation in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in response to Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack on Israel.

    That attack killed more than 1,400 people.

    In Gaza, where half of the overall population are children, access to medical aid, food, water, fuel, electricity and other normal daily necessities of life have evaporated in recent days amid sustained Israeli bombardment.

    Over the weekend, after days of a complete siege of the exclave by Israel, the first trucks reported to be carrying medicine and medical supplies, food and water entered Gaza on Saturday.

    Palestinians search under the rubble of a building destroyed by Israeli strikes in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 17, 2023.

    For Chen, the most pressing problem is to figure out how to get the incubators to where they are most needed on the ground there. “As we did for Ukraine, we’re looking for partnerships with organizations that can get into the region effectively and also for funding,” she said. As a nonprofit, Chen said donations are sought through GoFundMe and a mix of individual donors, foundations and corporate donations.

    Her team is working on a partnership with a humanitarian relief organization to respond in Gaza. “We’re also reaching out to organizations in Israel to assess the need for our incubators there,” she added.

    A couple of hundred incubators are ready to immediately be sent to Israel and Gaza. Said Chen, “Depending on the need, we would go into production for more. But the big question is, can we get into those areas? We don’t want to ship products and then have them sit there.”

    Linus Liang, along with Chen, was among the original team of graduate students at Stanford University who, as part of a class assignment in 2007, were given a challenge to develop a low-cost infant incubator for use in developing countries.

    Liang, a software engineer who had already created and sold two gaming companies by then, was intrigued. “This class deliberately brought together people from different disciplines – law, business, medical school, engineers – to collaborate to solve world problems,” he said.

    “Our challenge was that about 20 million premature and low-birth-weight babies are born globally every year,” he said. “Many of them don’t survive, or if they do, they live with terrible health conditions.”

    Embrace Global founder Jane Chen at SVYM hospital in Karnataka, India, in 2013.

    The reasons why came down to factors such as a shortage of expensive conventional incubators or families living far away from medical centers to access quickly for their newborns.

    The team formed their company in 2008 and then took a few years to engineer and produce the solution, with Liang and Chen both moving to India for a few years to get it off the ground and market test it there. Chen said the incubators, made in India, underwent rigorous testing and are CE certified, a regulatory standard that a device must meet to be approved for use in the European market and in Asia and Africa.

    “We chose that route instead of seeking FDA approval because the need really is outside of the US,” said Liang. The cost per incubator is about $500, including cost of the product, training, distribution, shipping, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, said Chen. That compares to as much as $30,000 or more per conventional incubators, she said.

    Chen estimates some 15,000 babies benefited from Embrace incubators in 2022.

    Dr. Leah Seaman has been using Embrace incubators for three years in Zambia. Seaman is a doctor working in pediatrics for the last 12 years, including six years focusing on neonatal care at the Kapiri Mposhi District Hospital in the Central Province of Zambia.

    Seaman has also been busy setting up a new specialized neonatal ward in the rural district hospital. “When I first came to Zambia, we had one old incubator that would draw a lot of power,” she said. “We often struggle with power cuts here, so even the voltage can be too low for the incubator to function well. Having enough space to set up conventional incubator was an issue as well.”

    So she reached out to Chen in late 2020 after researching solutions that would work for the specific conditions in Zambia.

    Ambulance midwives after being trained in how to use the Embrace incubators at the Kapiri Mposhi District Hospital in Zambia in 2022.

    “In Zambia, 13% of births are premature, and that’s not even including low-birth-weight babies born at term,” she said. “We needed an effective solution.”

    Embrace Global donated 15 incubators to the hospital. The new neonatal ward, set to open this month, is built around the Embrace incubator stations with Kangaroo mother care, or skin to skin contact between mother and baby.

    “Last year we had 800 babies through the ward and maybe half of them used the Embrace incubator,” said Seaman. “This year we’ve had over 800 already. We haven’t asked for any conventional incubators because from 1 kg (2.2 lbs) and above, the Embrace incubator does the work.”

    Because of their heavy use, Seaman said the main challenge with the incubators is making sure that the heating pad is kept warm and reheated in a timely manner. “We’ve built a mattress station where we will be teaching the new mothers how to do that,” she said.

    “Why do we keep babies warm? It’s not just a nice thing. It literally does save lives,” Seaman said.

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  • Missing toddler found sleeping in woods using her dog as a pillow after walking 3 miles barefoot | CNN

    Missing toddler found sleeping in woods using her dog as a pillow after walking 3 miles barefoot | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A 2-year-old girl who walked barefoot more than three miles with her family’s two dogs was found sleeping off a wooded Michigan trail using the smaller dog as a pillow, authorities said.

    Troopers were called to a house in rural Faithorn, Michigan, around 8 p.m. on Wednesday after the toddler, Thea Chase, had wandered away from the home, Michigan State Police Lt. Mark Giannunzio told CNN on Friday.

    Faithorn is a small town about a mile east of Wisconsin’s border in northern Michigan.

    Brooke Chase, Thea’s mother, said she had an instinct to check on her daughter who had been playing in the yard, and learned the toddler’s uncle told Thea to go inside because she had no shoes on.

    When Chase and her brother-in-law realized Thea wasn’t in the house, she said she began to yell. They searched for about 20 minutes before calling Chase’s husband and police.

    “When we get a call like that, everything else stops,” Giannunzio said.

    Michigan State Police put out requests for drones, search-and-rescue and canine teams, while members of the close-knit community formed their own search party to help locate the child, who was assumed to be somewhere in the heavily wooded area near the home, Giannunzio said.

    Around midnight, four hours after police were first notified, a family friend searching for Thea on an all-terrain vehicle came across the Chase family’s rottweiler, Buddy, who started barking as he approached, according to Chase.

    The 2-year-old was discovered a short way off the trail, sleeping on the ground with her head atop Hartley, the family’s English Springer. When the ATV driver tried to get near the toddler to wake her up, the smaller dog growled, Chase said.

    “She has those dogs wrapped around her finger,” the mother said.

    Chase added she was “in a fog” for the roughly four hours that search teams looked for her daughter. While she stayed in the home with Thea’s younger brother, troopers searched the house multiple times and tried to comfort the mother.

    When Thea was returned home on the back of the ATV, the child was giggling and saying, “Hi, Mommy,” Chase said.

    The outdoor temperature was about 60 degrees when the toddler was found. Thea was determined to be fine after a medical evaluation, according to Giannunzio.

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  • Mother charged nearly 40 years after her newborn baby was found dead in remote woods | CNN

    Mother charged nearly 40 years after her newborn baby was found dead in remote woods | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A woman was charged in her newborn girl’s death nearly 40 years after the abandoned baby was found dead in a remote wooded area in New Jersey, according to the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office.

    On Christmas Eve 1984, officers discovered the baby’s body wrapped in a towel inside a plastic bag off a road in Mendham Township after two boys reported finding her that morning, a news release stated.

    The baby’s umbilical cord was still attached, according to the release issued Thursday. The medical examiner determined the infant, whose death was ruled a homicide, was alive at birth and died less than 24 hours later.

    The girl, whose identity was unknown, was named “Mary” after being baptized by a reverend of St. Joseph Church in Mendham Township, where she was buried, the prosecutor’s office said.

    Investigators were recently able to identify Baby Mary’s biological parents using “new technology, law enforcement networking in three states and old-fashioned police work,” the prosecutor’s office said.

    Baby Mary’s biological mother, who police did not name because she was a juvenile in 1984, was a South Carolina resident when she gave birth to the child, the prosecutor’s office said.

    The biological father died before being identified, and police say there is no evidence he was aware of either the woman’s pregnancy or the baby’s birth and death.

    Authorities filed a juvenile delinquency complaint against the mother in April and charged her with one count of manslaughter, an offense which would be a second-degree crime if committed by an adult, according to the release.

    “This arrest is the culmination of decades of effort, across multiple generations of law enforcement,” Morris County Prosecutor Robert J. Carroll said.

    “The death and abandonment of this baby girl is a tragic loss and even after nearly 40 years, remains just as heartbreaking,” Carroll said. “Justice may not take the form the public has imagined all these years, but we believe with this juvenile delinquency complaint, justice is being served for Baby Mary. Nothing can right this terrible wrong.”

    Police said New Jersey’s Safe Haven Infant Protection Act, which did not exist at the time of the child’s abandonment, can help parents and families to give up an infant safely, legally and anonymously.

    The act, which allows parents or their representatives to surrender a newborn 30 days old or younger at an emergency room, ambulance, police or fire station, became law in August 2000.

    “I want young parents to know that there is help available,” Morris County Sheriff James Gannon said in the release. “The baby will be accepted with no questions asked.”

    Every Christmas Eve for the past 35 years, community members and law enforcement have held a remembrance service at the Baby Mary’s grave “to ensure she is never forgotten,” Mendham Township Police Chief Ross Johnson said.

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  • Here’s what happens when a parking garage becomes a delivery room | CNN

    Here’s what happens when a parking garage becomes a delivery room | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    When Dr. Janelle Cooper, an OB/GYN, pulled into the parking garage of the hospital where she works in Annapolis, Maryland, and walked toward the building, she saw a man running and thought, “Oh, that’s unusual.”

    She noticed “a truck that was parked in the middle of the street, and the doors were flung open,” Cooper told CNN.

    And then, she heard a cry from the backseat that pieced everything together.

    “I’d know those screams anywhere,” Cooper said.

    The running man was the grandfather of Elsa Antunez. He had rushed her to the Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center.

    He stopped the truck in the parking garage by an entrance which would have put Artunez only a few feet from the front desk, where she would have been transported by a wheelchair to the delivery unit.

    But by the time the car was in park, it was too late. The baby was coming.

    When Cooper reached the truck, the baby’s head was already out.

    “My instinct took over and I just jumped into action and delivered the baby,” Copper said.

    Jean Andres, the hospital’s labor and delivery director, arrived at work a few moments later.

    Andres heard the “very distinct scream” delivery room teams recognize instantly.

    “I put my lunch bag down, called the team to let them know we had a delivery in the garage,” Andres told CNN. “And I proceeded to assist Dr. Cooper with the delivery that she had performed.”

    Artunez gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Yesenia Patricia, and surprisingly for a first-time mother, the doctor noted, it went quickly. “She did really well.”

    Once Yesenia was born, Andres dried her off and kept her warm until the medical team came and took the family to a maternity room in the hospital.

    “The fact that it was in a garage was very unconventional, but it was not chaotic,” Andres said. “It was actually a very beautiful birth,” she recalled.

    And although Cooper has delivered thousands of babies, she said this time was different.

    “I’ve delivered in different places around the hospital before, but never in the back of a pickup truck,” she said.

    Baby Yesenia isn’t the first to be born in the medical center’s parking garage, Andres and Cooper noted, nonplussed.

    “We delivered a baby in the elevator this week,” Cooper told CNN.

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  • New audio of Princess Diana claims Charles was disappointed at having boy, not girl, when Prince Harry was born | CNN

    New audio of Princess Diana claims Charles was disappointed at having boy, not girl, when Prince Harry was born | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    New audio has been released of Princess Diana talking about how Britain’s Prince Charles – now King Charles III – was disappointed that they were having a boy, not a girl, when Prince Harry was born.

    The late princess recorded a series of audio tapes in the 1990s and had them secretly delivered to author Andrew Morton before her death in a high-speed car crash in 1997.

    Some of the audio is being heard for the first time ahead of a documentary coming out next year called, “Diana: The Rest of Her Story.”

    Thursday marked 26 years since Diana’s death.

    ABC’s Good Morning America got an exclusive listen to the tapes in which Diana says her husband wouldn’t even talk to her stepmother Raine Spencer.

    “Because at Harry’s Christening, Charles went up to mummy and said, ‘You know we were so disappointed, we thought it would be a girl,’” she said.

    “And mummy snapped his head off and said, ‘You should realize how lucky you are to have a child that’s normal,’” she recalled.

    Diana said ever since that day, “a shutter’s come down, and that’s what he does when he gets somebody answering back at him.”

    Prince Harry and his wife Meghan announced in January, 2020 that they were stepping back from their roles as senior members of the British royal family and planned to split their time between the United Kingdom and North America, as they worked towards becoming financially independent.

    In response, late Queen Elizabeth II said in a statement then that they would no longer be performing work duties and would cease receiving public funds for royal duties.

    Since then, they have been featured in a Netflix docuseries critical of how the media and the royal family treated them, while Harry recounted his past in his memoir Spare.

    In the newly released recordings, Diana also discusses the troubled relationship she had with her stepmother.

    “And I said, ‘I hate you so much. If you only knew how much we all hated you for what you’ve done. You’ve ruined the house. You’ve spent Daddy’s money.’ I said everything I possibly could,” she said.

    She recalled Spencer reacting by saying she had “no idea how much pain your mother put your father through.”

    The late Princess responded: ‘Pain, Raine? That’s one word you don’t even know how to relate to. In my job and in my role, I see people suffer like you’ve never seen. And you call that pain? I said, you’ve got a lot to learn.’ I remember really going for her gullet.”

    Her biographer Andrew Morton told ABC’s Good Morning America Friday that there is a real “poignancy” in hearing her voice and first-hand views of the monarchy.

    “She never thought for a second that Camilla would become queen, so we have a very different perspective on unfolding history,” Morton said.

    There are seven hours of tapes in total. When asked if he would release more audio, Morton said, “There is global interest, but we’ll have to see what happens.”

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  • British nurse guilty of murdering seven babies, making her UK’s worst child serial killer in recent times | CNN

    British nurse guilty of murdering seven babies, making her UK’s worst child serial killer in recent times | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A British nurse has been found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the hospital where she worked, making her the country’s worst baby serial killer in recent times.

    Lucy Letby, 33, harmed babies in her care by injecting air into their blood and stomachs, overfeeding them with milk, physically assaulting them and poisoning them with insulin, Manchester Crown Court in northern England heard.

    Police found a trove of handwritten notes while searching Letby’s house during their investigation, including one that read: “I am evil I did this.”

    She secretly attacked 13 babies on the neonatal ward at the Countess of Chester hospital between 2015 and 2016, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said in a statement.

    Her intention was to kill the babies while duping her colleagues into believing there was a natural cause of death, prosecutors argued.

    Doctors at the hospital began to notice a steep rise in the number of babies who were dying or unexpectedly collapsing, the court heard.

    But concerns raised by consultants over the increased mortality rate of patients under Letby’s care were initially dismissed by the hospital’s management, the UK’s PA Media news agency reported.

    In September 2016, Letby filed a grievance against her employers after she was relocated from the hospital’s neonatal ward. She was put back on clerical duties after two male triplets died and a baby boy collapsed on three days in a row in June 2016.

    Later that year, she was notified of the allegations against her by the Royal College of Nursing union, but the complaint was later resolved in her favor. Doctors were asked to formally apologize to Letby in writing.

    She was scheduled to return to the neonatal department in March 2017, but her return did not take place. The hospital trust contacted the police, who opened an investigation.

    Nurse said ‘I killed them’ in handwritten notes

    In 2018 and 2019, Letby was arrested twice by police in connection with their investigation, PA said. She was arrested again in November 2020.

    Authorities found notes Letby had written during searches of her address.

    “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them,” she wrote in one memo, adding in another, “I am a horrible evil person” and in capital letters “I am evil I did this.”

    Pascale Jones of the CPS called Letby’s actions a “complete betrayal of the trust placed in her.”

    “Lucy Letby sought to deceive her colleagues and pass off the harm she caused as nothing more than a worsening of each baby’s existing vulnerability,” she said.

    “In her hands, innocuous substances like air, milk, fluids – or medication like insulin – would become lethal. She perverted her learning and weaponised her craft to inflict harm, grief and death.”

    Victims’ families said they “may never truly know why this happened.”

    “To lose a baby is a heartbreaking experience that no parent should ever have to go through,” a joint statement said.

    “But to lose a baby or to have a baby harmed in these particular circumstances is unimaginable,” the statement added.

    “Justice has been served and the nurse who should have been caring for our babies has been found guilty of harming them.

    “But this justice will not take away from the extreme hurt, anger and distress that we have all had to experience.

    “We are heartbroken, devastated, angry and feel numb.”

    Letby will be sentenced at Manchester Crown Court on August 21.

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  • Snapchat adds new safety features for teen users | CNN Business

    Snapchat adds new safety features for teen users | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Snapchat says it’s working to make its app even safer for teen users.

    Parent company Snap said Thursday that it is rolling out a suite of new features and policies aimed at better protecting 13- to 17-year-old users, including restrictions on friend suggestions and a new system for removing age-inappropriate content. The company also launched a series of YouTube videos for parents about the features and an updated website laying out its teen safety and parental control policies.

    The new features come amid increasing pressure on social media platforms by lawmakers, educators and parents to protect young users from inappropriate content, unwanted adult attention, illicit drug sales and other issues. A Snap executive testified alongside leaders from TikTok and YouTube in a fall 2021 Senate committee hearing about youth safety on social media, promising new tools to help parents keep their teens safe. And since then, Snapchat — like other platforms — has rolled out a variety of new teen safety and parental supervision tools.

    Thursday’s announcement follows the launch last year of Snapchat’s Family Center, which offers parents more insight into who their teenagers are communicating with on the messaging app. The app’s other existing teen safety measures include prohibiting young users from having public profiles and having teens’ Snap Map location-sharing tool turned off by default.

    As part of Thursday’s feature rollout, Snapchat will now require 13-to-17-year-old users to have a greater number of mutual friends in common with another account before that account will show up in Search results or as a friend suggestion, in an effort to avoid teens adding users on the app who they don’t know in real life. The app will also send a pop-up warming to teens if they are about to add an account that doesn’t share any mutual Snapchat friends or phone book contacts.

    “When a teen becomes friends with someone on Snapchat, we want to be confident it is someone they know in real life — such as a friend, family member, or other trusted person,” the company said in a blog post.

    Snapchat will also impose a new strike system for accounts promoting content inappropriate for teens in its Stories and Spotlight sections, where users can share content publicly on the app. If inappropriate content is reported or detected by the company, it will immediately remove the content and issue a strike against the poster’s account. If a user accrues “too many strikes over a defined period of time, their account will be disabled,” the platform says, although it does not lay out how many strikes would lead to a suspension.

    Teen users will also start to see in-app content aimed at educating them on online risks such as catfishing and financial sextortion — when someone persuades a victim to share nude photos and then blackmails them for money — and letting them know what to do if they see it, including providing hotlines to contact for help. The PSA-style content will be featured on Snapchat’s Stories platform and in response to certain search terms or keywords.

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  • America’s child care problem is about to get a lot worse. Here’s why | CNN Politics

    America’s child care problem is about to get a lot worse. Here’s why | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Sarah Morgan was looking forward to enrolling her 1-year-old son Lucas at the Skagit Valley Family YMCA’s early learning center in Anacortes, Washington, this fall.

    Her older son Jameson, 5, had a wonderful experience there, learning his letters, numbers and colors, as well as social skills – all of which smoothed his transition to kindergarten this year.

    But in late August, Morgan found out that the YMCA was closing the Anacortes center.

    Like many child care providers across the nation, the YMCA has had to rethink its operations with the looming expiration of a $24 billion federal Covid-19 pandemic support program that kept many centers afloat over the past two years. The nonprofit, which received $271,000 for its early learning programs, opted to close the Anacortes location, which served 21 families, so it could funnel its resources into its three remaining centers, said its CEO Dean Snider.

    That decision has left the Morgan family scrambling to find alternate arrangements for Lucas. Child care is limited on Anacortes, an island in the northwest part of the state. The YMCA’s closest remaining centers are a 40-minute drive away, which doesn’t fit the work schedules of either her or her husband, Travus. And the nannies they interviewed asked for hourly rates that are close to what Morgan earns.

    So Morgan plans to place Lucas with an in-home provider, though she worries he won’t have the same educational opportunities that his older brother had at the YMCA.

    “It’s really sad that my next one won’t have that type of experience,” said Morgan, a social worker employed by the state. “It’s just really been devastating.”

    Nationwide, more than 70,000 child care programs are projected to close, and about 3.2 million children could lose their spots due to the end of the child care stabilization grant program on September 30, according to an analysis by The Century Foundation.

    The historic federal investment, which was part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that Democrats passed in March 2021, supported more than 220,000 child care programs, affecting as many as 9.6 million children, according to the federal Administration for Children & Families. It reached more than 8 in 10 licensed child care centers, helping them hold onto workers by offering bonuses and raising wages, cover their rent, mortgage and utilities, buy personal protective equipment and other supplies, and provide mental health support.

    “We have not spent that much money on child care previously in the US,” said Julie Kashen, women’s economic justice director at The Century Foundation. “What we learned was that it worked. It kept programs open. It helped address the staffing shortages. It kept children safe and nurtured. It kept parents working.”

    Child care in America has long had issues: The costs are steep for both providers and parents, leaving it both in short supply and unaffordable for many families. Last year, the average annual price nationwide was nearly $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, though the rates can be much higher depending on the location.

    At the same time, the pay is low, making it hard for workers to commit to the industry and for centers to hold onto their staff. Child care workers typically earned $13.71 an hour, or $28,520 a year, in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment remains lower than it was prior to the pandemic.

    For Carla Smith, the stabilization grants were a “miracle.”

    Smith, who founded Cornerstone Academy in Arlington, Texas, 17 years ago while nursing her newborn son, used $1.1 million in stabilization grants and other federal relief funding to rebuild after enrollment plunged in the first year of the pandemic. She was able to hire more employees and boost the wages of her teachers and administrative staff to as much as $25 an hour. That’s about double what most were earning before and enticed them to stay at the academy.

    Carla Smith founded and operates Cornerstone Academy in Arlington, Texas.

    “It kept the day care open. It kept day care workers employed, and it kept families employed,” said Smith, who now cares for 50 children ages 6 weeks to 5 years.

    Now that she won’t receive any additional federal stabilization funds, Smith is worried she might have to close her doors next summer if the church that houses the center doesn’t step in to help. She just raised tuition by up to $200 a month for most children and $600 a month for infants, prompting one family to leave and several others to pull out of the after-school program. She and the assistant director have taken five-figure pay cuts, she laid off one worker and she reduced the hours of the others.

    “The next layoff will be myself,” she said, noting that she’s already looking for other jobs so she can keep the academy operating.

    Without the stabilization grants, the Chinese-American Planning Council in New York City will have a tougher time hiring and retaining staffers who care for 180 children at six sites, said Mary Cheng, the director of childhood development services. The nearly $600,000 in funding allowed her to provide bonuses of up to $2,500 every six months between July 2021 and this summer, as well as temporarily increase the pay of the after-school staff by a dollar or two. In addition, she used the funds to buy air purifiers and cleaning supplies, as well as provide mental health support for the children and staff.

    Now, she’s looking for several teachers and assistant teachers, as well as an education director for one of the sites. But it’s hard to attract candidates when the pay she’s offering – even for the director role – is less than an entry-level public school teacher.

    Already, because of the staffing shortage, she’s had to close one classroom in a public housing development, turning away the parents of 12 children.

    But the council may have to undertake some more fundamental changes to its child care program, which has been funded by the city since it started in the 1970s. Cheng is looking to raise $500,000 in donations and grants for its preschool and after-school programs this year to cover the shortfall in federal support, far more than the $15,000 it has raised annually in the past.

    The Chinese-American Planning Council used its pandemic stabilization grants to retain and hire staff, as well as buy cleaning supplies and provide mental health services.

    And it may have to start accepting children whose parents can pay tuition for the first time.

    “Now I have to think about ‘How do I make a profit?,” said Cheng, who attended the child care program when she was little. “You have to sustain the programming that has to happen for these families. You have to think about a profit in that way because when things hit the fan like this, you’ve got to figure out ‘What can I do to make ends meet?’”

    A group of Democratic and independent senators and representatives are pushing to extend federal assistance for child care beyond September 30. They introduced the Child Care Stabilization Act, which would provide $16 billion each year for the next five years.

    “There was a child care crisis even before the pandemic – and failing to extend these critical investments from the American Rescue Plan will push child care even further out of reach for millions of families and jeopardize our strong economic recovery,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said in a statement. “This is an urgent economic priority at every level: Child care is what allows parents to go to work, businesses to hire workers, and it’s an investment in our kids’ futures. The child care industry holds up every sector of our economy – and Congress must act now.”

    Meanwhile, a bipartisan bill introduced in the House would enhance three existing tax credits – the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit and the Dependent Care Assistance Program – to help make child care more affordable for families and to support employers in sharing the cost of care.

    However, getting any additional funding through Congress will be difficult. House GOP hardliners are determined to cut spending in the fiscal 2024 government funding bill, making it more likely the government could shut down on October 1.

    Vanessa Quarles is among the many child care providers who hope that Congress renews its support for the industry.

    Quarles, who runs Bridges Transitional Preschool & Childcare in Evansville, Indiana, cannot take in more children until she can find more workers. But she can only afford to pay up to $14 an hour, which is barely a livable wage in the area, she said. Quarles raised tuition in February and stopped offering lunch, but she fears she’ll drive away parents if she asks them to shell out any more.

    Vanessa Quarles, a child care provider, has found it hard to hire workers even though she advertises widely.

    If she received federal funding, she would be able to provide raises and bonuses to attract more employees.

    “A lot of people are having a hard time accepting the pay range of child care workers,” said Quarles, who did not receive any stabilization grants. “That’s one reason why we are not fully functioning.”

    At least 17 states invested their own money into child care this year, according to a tally by Child Care Aware. These include historic investments by Alabama, Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont and Washington.

    Washington funneled more than $400 million this year into early learning, the largest investment in state history, according to Child Care Aware. It builds on the Fair Start for Kids Act, which state lawmakers passed in 2021. The effort increased the number of households eligible for assistance by raising income eligibility limits – a family of four earning as much as $5,600 a month in 2023 qualifies for monthly copays of only $165. It also bumped up the rates paid to providers for serving state-subsidized families.

    But more needs to be done to keep providers afloat, said Ryan Pricco, director of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware of Washington. Currently, reimbursement rates are determined by a market survey, but that reflects what parents can afford, not the true cost of care.

    “Until we switch our subsidy system, and really our whole financing system, over to a cost of care model and reimburse programs that way, they’re going to continue to struggle to keep up with competitors and other low-income industries,” he said.

    The Skagit Valley Family YMCA had to close one of its early learning centers after the federal stabilization program expired.

    While the Skagit Valley Family YMCA needed the stabilization grants to bolster its child care workforce, those infusions alone are not enough to solve its financial imbalance, Snider said. Revenue from families paying full price and subsidized rates only cover the cost of staffing, not rent, food for the children and other expenses. The agency has racked up six-figure losses across its early learning centers so far this year, which is “obviously unsustainable,” Snider said.

    “Early learning is not a viable proposition right now,” he continued. “Everyone calls it necessary, but no one’s willing to put the resources in yet to make it possible.”

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  • How to block graphic social media posts on your kids’ phones | CNN Business

    How to block graphic social media posts on your kids’ phones | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Many schools, psychologists and safety groups are urging parents to disable their children’s social media apps over mounting concerns that Hamas plans to disseminate graphic videos of hostages captured in the Israel-Gaza war.

    Disabling an app or implementing restrictions, such as filtering out certain words and phrases, on young users’ phones may be sound like a daunting process. But platforms and mobile operating systems offer safeguards that could go along way in protecting a child’s mental health.

    Following the attacks on Israel last weekend, much of the terror has played out on social media. Videos of hostages taken on the streets and civilians left wounded continue to circulate on varying platforms. Although some companies have pledged to restrict sensitive videos, many are still being shared online.

    That can be particularly stressful for minors. The American Psychological Association recently issued a warning about the psychological impacts of the ongoing violence in Israel and Gaza, and other research has linked exposure to violence on social media and in the news as a “cycle of harm to mental health.”

    Alexandra Hamlet, a clinical psychologist in New York City, told CNN people who are caught off guard by seeing certain upsetting content are more likely to feel worse than individuals who choose to engage with content that could be upsetting to them. That’s particularly true for children, she said.

    “They are less likely to have the emotional control to turn off content that they find triggering than the average adult, their insight and emotional intelligence capacity to make sense of what they are seeing is not fully formed, and their communication skills to express what they have seen and how to make sense of it is limited comparative to adults,” Hamlet said.

    If deleting an app isn’t an option, here are other ways to restrict or closely monitor a child’s social media use:

    Parents can start by visiting the parental control features found on their child phone’s mobile operating system. iOS’ Screen Time tool and Android’s Google Family Link app help parents manage a child’s phone activity and can restrict access to certain apps. From there, various controls can be selected, such as restricting app access or flagging inappropriate content.

    Guardians can also set up guardrails directly within social media apps.

    TikTok: TikTok, for example, offers a Family Pairing feature that allows parents and guardians to link their own TikTok account to their child’s account and restrict their ability to search for content, limit content that may not be appropriate for them or filter out videos with words or hashtags from showing up in feeds. These features can also be enabled within the settings of the app, without needing to sync up a guardian’s account.

    Facebook, Instagram and Threads: Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and threads, has an educational hub for parents with resources, tips and articles from experts on user safety, and a tool that allows guardians to see how much time their kids spend on Instagram and set time limits, which some experts advise should be considered during this time.

    YouTube: On YouTube, the Family Link tool allows parents to set up supervised accounts for their children, screen time limits or block certain content. At the same time,YouTube Kids also provides a safer space for kids, and parents who decide their kids are ready to see more content on YouTube can create a supervised account. In addition, autoplay is turned off by default for anyone under 18 but can be turned off anytime in Settings for all users.

    Hamlet said families should consider creating a family policy where family members agree to delete their apps for a certain period of time.

    “It could be helpful to frame the idea as an experiment, where everyone is encouraged to share how not having the apps has made them feel over the course of time,” she said. “It is possible that after a few days of taking a break from social media, users may report feeling less anxious and overwhelmed, which could result in a family vote of continuing to keep the apps deleted for a few more days before checking in again.”

    If there’s resistance, Hamlet said should try to reduce the time spent on apps right now and come up with an agreed upon number of minutes each day for usage.

    “Parents could ideally include a contingency where in exchange for allowing the child to use their apps for a certain number of minutes, their child must agree to having a short check in to discuss whether there was any harmful content that the child had exposure to that day,” she said. “This exchange allows both parents to have a protected space to provide effective communication and support, and to model openness and care for their child.”

    TikTok: A TikTok spokesperson, which said the platform uses technology and 40,000 safety professionals to moderate the platform, told CNN it is taking the situation seriously and has increased dedicated resources to help prevent violent, hateful, or misleading content on the platform.

    Meta: Meta similarly said it has set up a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to monitor and respond to the situation. “Our teams are working around the clock to keep our platforms safe, take action on content that violates our policies or local law, and coordinate with third-party fact checkers in the region to limit the spread of misinformation,” Meta said in a statement. “We’ll continue this work as this conflict unfolds.”

    YouTube: Google-owned YouTube said it is providing thousands of age-restricted videos that do not violate its policies – some of these, however, are not appropriate for viewers under 18. (This may include bystander footage). The company told CNN it has “removed thousands of harmful videos” and its teams “remain vigilant to take action quickly across YouTube, including videos, Shorts and livestreams.”

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  • NY officials announce legislation aimed at protecting kids on social media | CNN Business

    NY officials announce legislation aimed at protecting kids on social media | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Two new bills meant to protect children’s mental health online by changing the way they are served content on social media and by limiting companies’ use of their data will be introduced in the New York state legislature, state and city leaders said Wednesday.

    New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James made the announcement at the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers Manhattan, joined by UFT President Michael Mulgrew, State Senator Andrew Gounardes, Assemblywoman Nily Rozic and community advocates.

    “Our children are in crisis, and it is up to us to save them,” Hochul said, comparing social media algorithms to cigarettes and alcohol. “The data around the negative effects of social media on these young minds is irrefutable, and knowing how dangerous the algorithms are, I will not accept that we are powerless to do anything about it.”

    The “Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act” would limit what New York officials say are the harmful and addictive features of social media for children. The act would allow users under 18 and their parents to opt out of receiving feeds driven by algorithms designed to harness users’ personal data to keep them on the platforms for as long as possible. Those who opt out would receive chronological feeds instead, like in the early days of social media.

    The bill would also allow users and parents who opt in to receiving algorithmically generated content feeds to block access to social media platforms between 12am and 6am or to limit the total number of hours per day a minor can spend on a platform.

    “This is a major issue that we all feel strongly about and that must be addressed,” James said. “Nationwide, children and teens are struggling with significantly high rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and other mental health issues, largely because of social media.”

    The bill targets platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube, where feeds are comprised of user-generated content along with other material the platform suggests to users based on their personal data. Tech platforms have designed and promoted voluntary tools aimed at parents to help them control what content their kids can see, arguing that the decision about what boundaries to set should be up to individual families. But that hasn’t stopped critics from calling on platforms to do more — or from threatening further regulation.

    “Our children deserve a safer and more secure environment online, free from addictive algorithms and exploitation,” said Gounardes. “Algorithms are the new tobacco. Simple as that.”

    The New York legislation comes amid a raft of similar bills across the country that purport to safeguard young users by imposing tough new rules on platforms.

    States including Arkansas, Louisiana and Utah have passed bills requiring tech platforms to obtain a parent’s consent before creating accounts for teens. Federal lawmakers have introduced a similar bill that would ban kids under 13 from using social media altogether. And numerous lawsuits against social media platforms have accused the companies of harming users’ mental health. The latest of these suits came on Tuesday, when Utah’s attorney general sued TikTok for allegedly misleading consumers about the app’s safety.

    Mulgrew called the New York legislation necessary in part due to a lack of action by the federal government to protect kids.

    “The last time, first and only time that the United States government passed a bill to protect children in social media was 1998,” Mulgrew said, referring to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law that prohibits the collection of personal data from Americans under the age of 13 without parental consent. In July, the US Senate commerce committee voted to advance a bill that would expand COPPA’s protections to teens for the first time.

    New York officials on Wednesday also highlighted risks to children’s privacy online, including the chance their location or other personal data could fall into the hands of human traffickers and others who might prey on youth.

    “While other states and countries have enacted laws to limit the personal data that online platforms can collect from minors, no such restrictions currently exist in New York,” a press release from earlier Wednesday stated. “The two pieces of legislation introduced today will add critical protections for children and young adults online.”

    The New York Child Data Protection Act would protect children’s data online by prohibiting all online sites from collecting, using, sharing or selling the personal data of anyone under 18 for the purposes of advertising, without informed consent or unless doing so is strictly necessary for the purpose of the website. For users under 13, this informed consent must come from a parent or guardian.

    Both bills would authorize the attorney general to bring an action to enjoin or seek damages or civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation and would allow parents or guardians of minors to sue for damages of up to $5,000 per user incident or for actual damages, whichever is greater.

    The US Department of Health and Human Services says that while social media provides some benefits, it also presents “a meaningful risk of harm to youth.” The Surgeon General’s Social Media and Youth Mental Health Advisory released in May said children and adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems like depression and anxiety, a finding the report called “concerning” given a recent survey that showed teens spend an average of 3.5 hours a day on social media.

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  • Parents urged to delete their kids’ social media accounts ahead of possible Israeli hostage videos | CNN Business

    Parents urged to delete their kids’ social media accounts ahead of possible Israeli hostage videos | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Schools in Israel, the UK and the US are advising parents to delete their children’s social media apps over concerns that Hamas militants will broadcast or disseminate disturbing videos of hostages who have been seized in recent days.

    A Tel Aviv school’s parent’s association said it expects videos of hostages “begging for their lives” to surface on social media. In a message to parents, shared with CNN by a mother of children at a high school in Tel Aviv, the association asked parents to remove apps such as TikTok from their children’s phones.

    “We cannot allow our kids to watch this stuff. It is also difficult, furthermore – impossible – to contain all this content on social media,” according to the parent’s association. “Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.”

    Hamas has warned that it will post murders of hostages on social media if Israel targets people in Gaza without warning.

    There are additional concerns that terrorists will exploit social media algorithms to specifically target such videos to followers of Jewish or Israeli influencers in an effort to wage psychological warfare on Israelis and Jews and their supporters globally.

    During the onslaught on Saturday, armed Hamas militants poured over the heavily-fortified border into Israel and took as many as 150 hostages, including Israeli army officers, back to Gaza. The surprise attacks killed at least 1,200 people, according to the Israel Defense Forces, and injured thousands more.

    Since Israel began airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave Saturday, at least 1,055 people have been killed in Gaza, including hundreds of children, women, and entire families, according to the Palestinian health ministry. It said a further 5,184 have been injured, as of Wednesday.

    As the war wages on, some Jewish schools in the US are also asking parents not to share related videos or photos that may surface, and to prevent children – and themselves – from watching them. The schools are also advising community members to delete their social media apps during this time.

    “Together with other Jewish day schools, we are warning parents to disable social media apps such as Instagram, X, and Tiktok from their children’s phones,” the head of a school in New Jersey wrote in an email. “Graphic and often misleading information is flowing freely, augmenting the fears of our students. … Parents should discuss the dangers of these platforms and ask their children on a daily basis about what they are seeing, even if they have deleted the most unfiltered apps from their phones.”

    Another school in the UK said it asked students to delete their social media apps during a safety assembly.

    TikTok, Instagram and X – formerly known as Twitter – did not immediately respond to requests for comment on how they are combating the increase of videos being posted online and for comment on schools asking parents to delete these apps.

    But X said on its platform is has experienced an increase in daily active users in the conflict area and its escalation teams have “actioned tens of thousands of posts for sharing graphic media, violent speech, and hateful conduct.” It did not respond to a request to comment further or define “actioned.”

    “We’re also continuing to proactively monitor for antisemitic speech as part of all our efforts,” X’s safety team said. “Plus we’ve taken action to remove several hundred accounts attempting to manipulate trending topics.”

    The company added it remains “laser focused” on enforcing the site’s rules and reminded users they can limit sensitive media they may encounter by visiting the “Content you see” option in Settings.

    Still, misinformation continues to run rampant on social media platforms, including X.

    A post viewed more than 500,000 times – featuring the hashtag #PalestineUnderAttack – claimed to show an airplane being shot down. But the clip was from the video game Arma 3, as was later noted in a “community note” appended to the post.

    Another video that is purported to show Israeli generals after being captured by Hamas fighters was viewed more than 1.7 million times by Monday. The video, however, instead shows the detention of separatists in Azerbaijan.

    On Tuesday, the European Union warned Elon Musk of “penalties” for disinformation circulating on X amid Israel-Hamas war.

    The EU also informed Meta CEO Zuckerberg on Wednesday of a disinformation surge on its platforms – which include Facebook – and demanded the company respond in 24 hours with how it plans to combat the issue.

    In an Instagram story on Tuesday, Zuckerberg called the attack “pure evil” and said his focus “remains on the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and the region.”

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  • Illinois passes a law that requires parents to compensate child influencers | CNN Business

    Illinois passes a law that requires parents to compensate child influencers | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    When 16-year-old Shreya Nallamothu from Normal, Illinois, scrolled through social media platforms to pass time during the pandemic, she became increasingly frustrated with the number of children she saw featured in family vlogs.

    She recalled the many home videos her parents filmed of herself and her sister over the years: taking their first steps, going to school and other “embarrassing stuff.”

    “I’m so glad those videos stayed in the family,” she said. “It made me realize family vlogging is putting very private and intimate moments onto the internet.”

    She said reminders and lectures from her parents about how everything is permanent online intensified her reaction to the videos she saw of kid influencers. “The fact that these kids are either too young to grasp that or weren’t given the chance to grasp that is really sad.”

    Nallamothu wrote a letter last year to her state senator, Democrat Dave Koehler, urging him to consider legislation to protect young influencers. Last week, her home state became the first to pass a law that establishes safeguards for minors who are featured in online videos – and how they’re compensated.

    Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker on Friday signed a bill, inspired by Nallamothu’s letter, amending the state’s Child Labor Law that will allow teenagers over the age of 18 to take legal action against their parents if they were featured in monetized social media videos and not properly compensated, similar to the rights held by child actors.

    Starting July 1 2024, parents in Illinois will be required to put aside 50% of earnings for a piece of content into a blocked trust fund for the child, based on the percentage of time they’re featured in the video. For example, if a child is in 50% of a video, they should receive 25% of the funds; if they’re in 100%, they are required to get 50% of the earnings. However, this only applies in scenarios during which the child appears on the screen for more than 30% of the vlogs in a 12-month period.

    “We understand that parents should receive compensation too because they have equity in this, but we don’t want to forget about the child,” Koehler told CNN.

    Many YouTube parent vloggers or social media influencers post multiple videos each month or weekly, sharing intimate details about their lives, ranging from family financial troubles and the birth of a new baby to opening new toys or going through a child’s phone or report card. Although children are predominantly featured in these monetized videos, parents have had no legal obligation to give them any portion of the earnings.

    Meanwhile, kid influencer accounts, which can at times earn $20,000 or more for sponsored posts, are typically run by parents and not often set up in the child’s name due to age restrictions on social media platforms.

    “We often see with emerging technology and trends that legislation is always a reaction to that,” Koehler said. “But we know with the explosion of social media that parents are using it to monetize kids being on videos. If money is being made and nothing is set up for the children, it’s the same thing as a child actor.”

    The new law is modeled off of the 1936 Jackie Coogan’s Law, the Hollywood silent actor discovered by Charlie Chaplin whose parents swindled him out of his earnings. That California law required parents to set aside a portion of 15% of child earnings in a blocked trust account that the child actor could access after the age of 18.

    Although similar bills have been proposed in California and Washington, Jessica Maddox — an assistant professor at The University of Alabama who studies the social media influencer community — said she’s hopeful other states will follow in Illinois’ footsteps.

    “Even though Illinois is the first state to pass such a law, this legislation is a long time coming,” Maddox said. “Social media labor and careers are becoming increasingly common and viable forms of income, and it’s important that the law catches up with technology to ensure minors aren’t being exploited.”

    Maddox said it also breathes new life into the long-simmering debate over what is appropriate for parents to document online and whether a child can really consent to participating.

    “I’ve seen organic conversations start to emerge between individuals who had been featured heavily in their parents’ social media content but are now of age to tell their stories and admit that had they really understood what was going on, they would have never consented for their lives to be broadcast for everyone.”

    Chris McCarty — the 19-year-old founder of Quit Clicking Kids, an advocacy and education site to combat the monetization of children on social media, who is helping to develop child influencer legislation in Washington State — believes that as the kids featured in family vlogs grow up and share their stories, there will be an increase in public pressure to provide more privacy protections.

    “When children are slightly older, often the narratives get increasingly personal; for example. detailing trouble with bullies, first periods, doctor’s visits, and mental health issues,” McCarty said. “A lot of consumers assume that children working in a family vlog and child actors have the same experiences. This is not the case. As difficult as it is to be a child actor, child actors are still playing a part rather than having their intimate personal details shared for entertainment and monetary purposes.”

    Nallamothu agrees that the next step is for legislation to evolve over time to include more regulations around consent.

    “I know this bill isn’t going to be perfect off the bat but I don’t want perfection to get in the way of progress because regulations have only started coming up,” she said. “I’m glad it’s getting there.”

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  • The Columbus Zoo thought this gorilla was a male — then it gave birth to a baby | CNN

    The Columbus Zoo thought this gorilla was a male — then it gave birth to a baby | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Zookeepers at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium arrived to a pair of unexpected discoveries Thursday morning: a newborn baby gorilla and the news that its mother wasn’t a male gorilla.

    The gorilla, Sully, has lived at the facility with her mother since 2019 and was thought to be male until “the gorilla care team discovered her holding the unexpected baby gorilla early Thursday,” the zoo announced in a news release.

    But how could the facility not know 8-year-old Sully was actually a female? And that she was pregnant?

    Well, gorillas “don’t have prominent sex organs” and males and females look mostly alike until around age 8, the zoo said in the release, noting it’s only later in life that males develop their large size, silver backs and distinctive head bumps.

    Along with the hard-to-distinguish features, veterinarians at the zoo where the gorilla was born took a “hands-off approach” with their care and allowed the primate to be cared for by its mother, the Columbus Zoo noted.

    When Sully arrived in Columbus, she was a “young and healthy animal” and didn’t require any medical procedures that would have led to the discovery sooner, the zoo said.

    The pregnancy was also missed because “gorillas rarely show outward signs” they are carrying because “newborns are smaller than human babies and gorillas naturally have large abdomens,” the release notes.

    With the gestation period for gorillas being eight and a half months, the zoo estimates Sully became pregnant in the fall.

    The zoo says the adorable infant appears to be a healthy female. “The veterinary and animal care teams have not yet approached the infant, giving them time to bond with one another and with the rest of the troop, but will conduct a wellness exam soon,” the facility said in the release.

    A DNA test will be performed later to determine the newborn’s father.

    The new mother and baby will be on display for guests at the zoo’s gorilla habitat starting Friday, according to the release.

    Western lowland gorillas – the subspecies that lives at the Columbus Zoo – are critically endangered, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. There are an estimated 100,000 left in the wild across central Africa, says the Columbus Zoo. Their population has been depleted due to habitat loss, deforestation and hunting for bushmeat.

    The surprise discovery builds on a history of gorilla conservation at the Columbus Zoo. The facility “was the first zoo in the world to welcome the birth of a baby gorilla” in 1956, according to the release.

    Sully’s yet-to be named infant is the 34th gorilla born at the zoo, says the release. “She’s an important part of our work to conserve these magnificent animals,” the facility wrote.

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