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Late in the evening on Jan. 27, 2004, four teenagers broke into an elderly neighbor’s house in the Southern California town of Perris, looking for cash. One of them, Shawn Khalifa, guarded the back door. Shawn, who had just turned 15, slipped into the kitchen and stole some chocolate candies. He briefly saw that the homeowner was seriously hurt, and he ran back outside. No one accused Shawn of laying a hand on the victim, Hubert Love, 77, but a jury convicted the teenager of first-degree...

Physical fitness in middle age is tied to a lower risk of later-life depression and death from cardiovascular disease, a new study reports. Both depression and cardiovascular disease are common in older people, and rates of depression are high in the presence of cardiovascular illness, especially stroke. Moreover, depression is a risk factor for adverse outcomes in cardiovascular disease patients. Researchers examined 17,989 men and women, average age 50, from 1971 to 2009, gathering health...

Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. has filed homicide charges against the East Pittsburgh police officer, Michael Rosefeld, who shot and killed the unarmed teenager Antwon Rose Jr . This was one of the top demands of people who’ve been protesting the killing. Zappala also cleared Rose of any wrongdoing. This announcement comes two days after Rose’s loved ones gathered at Woodland Hills Intermediate School for his funeral . While the service was reserved for family,...

This is the third in a series on reducing sexual assault. Last month in New York City, five leaders of organizations that seek to combat sexual assault gathered in a conference room in the headquarters of the New York Police Department. For three days, they read through rape case files from the Special Victims Division. Then they discussed what they saw with the division’s top officials. It is unusual, to say the least, for police investigators to let advocacy groups that often criticize...

“ Animals .” “ Menace .” “ Blood-stained killing fields .” These are all terms President Donald Trump used in a one-week period to describe undocumented immigrants, alleged members of MS-13 and the purported harm they are causing our country. The White House doubled down on these assertions by releasing an official statement titled, “What You Need to Know About the Violent Animals of MS-13.” Others in the administration have echoed these statements, including Thomas Homan, the acting U.S.

Beth Jameson, Ph.D., RN, NJ-CSN is a Nurse Scientist with a newly minted Ph.D. from Rutgers University. I was fortunate to meet Beth when she was in the midst of her dissertation research, which included interviewing school nurses about job satisfaction. I will never forget our intense and honest discussion when I shared my frustration with feeling like a “caged bird” at school. In fact, it was so eye-opening that I wrote a blog post called “The Tale of the Caged Bird.” Beth and I bonded...

We know that good relationships are so important to our happiness, yet we may not know just how vital they are to our health and well-being. What do our connections to others give us? And what happens when we don’t have them? The Vital Benefits of Good Relationships Research shows that good relationships help people live longer, deal with stress better, have healthier habits, and have stronger resistance to colds. In a 2010 review of 148 studies, researchers found that social relationships...

The idea of adding an adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) screening tool to your practice’s workflow can be daunting – which tool, will you have time, does it add enough value? The Child Health and Development Interactive System (CHADIS) is helping to address this challenge by partnering with the National Pediatric Practice Community on ACEs (NPPC) to add an ACEs questionnaire into its system. Join this webinar to learn more about how this collaboration can help support your efforts to...

This story has a mostly happy ending. However, it did not begin that way. It is a personal story, which begins with the police knocking on my door in Cary, North Carolina late one night in February 2017. I was sleeping and it was around 2 am, but the police forced me to go to a Crisis and Assessment Center in Raleigh, NC. I questioned why this was happening but the police said they did not know, and that “they were just doing their job.” While I was at UNC WakeBrook, I asked to see the...

A very short video about how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) affect adult illness such as heart disease, autoimmune disease and cancer, and why I wrote Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, And How You Can Heal .

In Cincinnati, a unique housing option is allowing low-income renters to participate in the management and upkeep of their homes as a way to earn dividends they can cash in later. Margery Spinney and Carol Smith founded Renting Partnerships in 2013 to help organize affordable housing communities for those with few choices. “There’s never going to be enough government funding to provide affordable housing for everybody,” Spinney says. “We are not replacing homeownership and we’re not going to...

Author Alissa Quart writes that the costs of housing, child care, health care and college are outpacing salaries and threatening the livelihoods of middle class Americans. [For more on this story by TERRY GROSS, go to https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/623367320/squeezed-explores-why-america-is-getting-too-expensive-for-the-middle-class ]