Teens are dying by suicide at an alarming rate. Public health officials call it a crisis. Researchers have identified several clusters nationwide. The survivors in this Arizona community are fighting back

Chicago is the six-time holder of a title that no city wants.

For the sixth year in a row, Chicago is the country's "rattiest city."

The Windy City has topped the list of the rattiest cities in the United States for the sixth year in a row.

Orkin, an Atlanta-based pest control service, ranks US cities based on the number of new rodent treatments from September 1 to August 31 of each year. The result is a list of 50 cities, with most changing spots each time the list is updated. Chicago, however, is still No. 1.

"Rodents are experts at sniffing out food and shelter, and they're resilient in their ways to obtain both," Ben Hottel, an Orkin entomologist, said in the company's press release. "Residential properties offer the ideal habitat for rodents, and once they've settled in, they're capable of reproducing rapidly and in large quantities."

Efforts to tame the city's rat population have been going on for years. Chicago's "war on rats" escalated with the introduction of a new rat task force back in 2016. Residents had even begun adopting cats to squash their numbers.

In a matter of months, the foster care system found itself drowning in hundreds of new cases. By 2017, the state needed space for 6,000 additional foster children – an influx equivalent to the size of the entire foster population of the state of New Jersey.

But lawmakers, child welfare leaders and Scott did not hire more caseworkers or increase the money paid to foster families to make more homes available. And they failed to tackle the root problems driving most of the removals: lack of access to drug treatment, mental health care and domestic violence services for parents.

Instead, they stood by as foster care agencies packed children into overcrowded homes and sent nearly 200 boys and girls to foster parents previously accused of abusing or neglecting the children in their care, a USA TODAY investigation found.

Dear Amy:

Recently, I noticed that the 13-year-old daughter of some close friends has been posting sexually provocative photos of herself on Instagram.

This is a public account, and strange men make sexual comments on her posts and she responds with lewd remarks that couldn’t be printed in a family newspaper.

I find it alarming, and so I notified the girl’s mother (who’s not on social media) and she thanked me for speaking up, but she also gave an excuse along the lines of “she’s just precocious.”

Meanwhile, the content continues. I think this is dangerous for the girl, but I also feel like it’s in the parents’ hands now. Is it right to continue to stay silent, once I’ve said my piece?

The obstacles and hardships facing working mothers are not new, but the pandemic has given them more visibility, says Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the book Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.

"Low-income families, single parents, they see how little support they have constantly because they're in a never-ending battle to figure out how to put food on the table, to keep a roof over their heads, [to find] someone to watch their kids so they aren't alone at home while they go to work," Collins says. "It's advantaged people who have long not seen these difficulties."

Now, the global pandemic and its horrifying trajectory in the U.S. have given Americans a chance to reflect on what could be different.

Dear Amy: My wife and I have been happily married for over 20 years. We have a question about how to handle an issue with some friends of ours. “Jake” is 56 and “Lucy” is 52. My wife and I are 50 and 53.

Both Jake and Lucy are getting divorced after having been married to their exes for over 25 years each. (Jake had a very poor sex life during his marriage.)

Jake and Lucy have been dating for a couple of months now. They are very into each other. My wife and I think this is great, but we are both uncomfortable with their behavior.

Another problem is that they are all over each other like slutty teenagers in public. It gets even worse when the four of us are hanging out in our backyard.

We totally support public displays of affection when done with class, but we draw the line at borderline sex acts in our kitchen right in front of us — when the four of us are conversing over a bottle of wine. PDAs should always be classy, and not gross and slutty.

Do you have any advice on how to politely ask Jake and Lucy to cut out the pornography and set some limits on what are appropriate actions when they are together in our presence?

Blinded by the Sight

As authorities in suburban Milwaukee gamed out the complex preparations to allow children back into classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic, they didn't plan for one scenario: parents deliberately sending infected kids to school.

Yet that's exactly what's happened multiple times in Washington and Ozaukee counties, health officials said this week.

"Something that happened and continued to happen … which I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would happen, is people sent their known positive kids to school," Washington Ozaukee Public Health Department officer Kirsten Johnson told WISN.

As health officials investigate cases in more than two dozens schools in the counties, some are demanding harsh repercussions for any parent caught sending a child to class after they test positive.

It’s a lesson in reading, writing and reefer.

Florida moms and dads have been spotted smoking weed, drinking and walking around half-naked in the background of their kids’ online classes, frustrated teachers said at a school board meeting.

“Parents, please make sure that you have on proper clothing when you are walking behind your child’s computer because we’ve seen them in their drawers, their bras, and everything else,” Boca Raton Elementary teacher Edith Pride vented Wednesday, according to KATV.

The disruption to schools caused by the coronavirus pandemic constitutes a “global education emergency” that threatens to derail the education of at least 24 million students projected to drop out of school as a result, said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“At the height of Covid-19,” 192 countries shuttered schools, leaving 1.6 billion students without in-person learning, Fore said on a press call hosted by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She added that now, more than 870 million students, “or half the world’s student population in 51 countries,” are still unable to return to school.

“The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return,” she said. “That’s why we are urging governments to prioritize reopening schools when restrictions are lifted.”

She added that beyond education, schools around the world provide many students with a source of nutrition and immunizations.

“At least 24 million children are projected to drop out of school due to Covid-19,” she said.

The rate of suicide among those aged 10 to 24 increased nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rise occurred in most states, with 42 experiencing significant increases.

"It's a real trend that has been demanding, for a while, a serious public health and research effort to understand what is happening and why," said Anna Mueller, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington who studies suicides in adolescents. "I don't buy that it's just social media, which is one of the explanations that I most consistently see."

"We absolutely need to be really careful to not think about suicide as just a white kid problem," Mueller said. "It's absolutely not. Kids across racial and ethnic groups and sexual orientations experience suicidal thoughts, and even attempt at significant rates."

But Mueller cautioned not to lose sight of the fact that suicidal thoughts are not uncommon, especially among young people.

Change is afoot in corporate America. For the past two months, everyone from Chevron to Comcast and Hershey’s to Harvard Business School has put out statements containing the phrase “We stand in solidarity with the Black community,” or some very close variant. The sudden outpourings of corporate sentiment were widely dismissed as meaningless, hypocritical, opportunistic, or all three. But there’s reason to believe that such vocal calls for change from corporations could actually be worse than meaningless—and in fact damage the chances that corporations will follow through on meaningful change in the months and years ahead.

Why? Less than a year ago, nearly 200 CEOs signed a solemn pledge, issued by the Business Roundtable, to stop caring primarily about their shareholders and to serve the needs of their workers, communities, and country too. The Wharton management professor Tyler Wry has been compiling data on the signatories’ behavior since. “We were interested in whether these statements were worth the paper they were printed on, or just symbolic,” he told me recently. “When COVID hit, it was a natural experiment and a chance to see if companies were living up to their word.”

The results have startled him. As COVID-19 spread in March and April, did signers give less of their capital to shareholders (via dividends and stock buybacks)? No. On average, signers actually paid out 20 percent more of their capital than similar companies that did not sign the statement. Then, as the coronavirus swept the country, did they lay off fewer workers? On the contrary, in the first four weeks of the crisis, Wry found, signers were almost 20 percent more prone to announce layoffs or furloughs. Signers were less likely to donate to relief efforts, less likely to offer customer discounts, and less likely to shift production to pandemic-related goods. “Signing this statement had zero positive effect,” said Wry. Why, though, would it produce a negative effect?

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are friends with a lovely couple. We have many things in common and enjoy hanging out with them. The problem is their kid. They have a son the same age as our younger son and the boys like hanging out with each other. At first that seemed like a great bonus to this friendship. But the longer we’ve been friends, the clearer it has become that their kid is a horrible person—rude, spoiled, insolent, a liar, and frequently downright mean to our kid (although our kid doesn’t seem to care and still wants to hang out with him). The parents do nothing to address his bad behavior. In fact, they coddle him. I know we need to mind our own business and not make comments on their objectively garbage parenting style, but can we distance our kid from theirs? Is it too weird to hang out with the parents and just never bring our own kid along? As a side note, we could leave our son with his older brother; they don’t have any other kids so we don’t really have an “adults only” option.


—Keeping My Mouth Shut Is Hard

Buffets - from the humblest hotel breakfasts to the grandest casino banquets - are struggling to stay afloat as new health restrictions come into place and wary diners eschew the self-serve dining tradition.

The appeal of all-you-can-eat food, with no waiter there to judge your food pairings or quantity, led the Washington Post this month to describe buffets as an "offer [of] public gluttony at an affordable price".

As many buffets go out of business across the US, others are innovating and trying desperately to keep the business model relevant and appetising.

In March, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates food safety for the federal government, recommended "discontinuing self-service buffets and salad bars" until the pandemic subsides.

White parents often avoid talking openly about race with white children because of the unfounded fear that it will call attention to differences that kids wouldn’t otherwise notice. Some insist their kids are just too young for such conversations.

If parents don’t explain why these inequities exist — that they exist because of longstanding systemic racism in this country — children will assume they must be justified or “natural.”

We asked experts to share some of the problematic things white kids commonly say and how parents can respond in order to further the conversation and create a teachable moment.

"As the women's movement went mainstream, I loved the options for women it created, but also felt there was a demonizing of men, an undervaluing of the family, and a blindness to how boys and men were being harmed that would have profound effects on families, boys, addiction, careers, male unemployment, the global economy and so on," he explained. "When I uncovered reasons that were not part of the public consciousness, I felt I had something to contribute."

Farrell soon discovered that there was little serious attention being paid to the space of boy's development, either in academia or anywhere else. The subject was, in Farrell's words, "a national afterthought."

What was not an afterthought to Farrell were the big disparities in outcomes of every kind between boys and girls in America. Disparities that crossed ethnic, racial and geographic boundaries.

"Before age 9, boys and girls commit suicide equally," Farrell told a Tedx audience. "By age 10 to 14, it is twice the amount for boys. Between 15 and 19, it is four times the amount, and by ages 18 to 24, it is six times the amount. That's staggering." Often, these tragedies seem to share one circumstance: the lack of a father in the home.