The parents of an 8-year-old student who killed himself after being persistently bullied can move forward with a lawsuit against the Cincinnati school district that alleges wrongful death and other charges, a federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday.

The lawsuit's allegations also charge school officials with intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress and failure to report child abuse. The lawsuit says Taye was bullied at his elementary school starting in first grade, with the bullying escalating in his third grade year.

Other students punched and kicked him in assaults and on Jan. 24, 2017, knocked him unconscious by throwing him against a bathroom wall, the parents say in the lawsuit.

He stayed home sick the next day, returned to school Jan. 26 and was bullied again in the bathroom by students who took his water bottle and tried to flush it down the toilet, his parents say. He killed himself that evening in his bedroom.

The support for nurses demonstrating outside South Coast Global Medical Center is clear. It was one of four protests at Orange County hospitals.
Nurses say that their safety and patient lives are at risk after the state allowed their hospital, part of KPC Health, to increase the patient to nurse ratio in the middle of a pandemic.

"So instead of giving us more nurses we got more work. Patients are going to die, nurses are gonna break, nurses are exhausted," says Karen Rodriguez, a registered nurse.

Nurses say that they are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, shifts go as long as 16 hours, four to five days a week, code after code, leaving them exhausted, waking up anxious in the middle of the night.

"It might be surge after surge and who knows, and they're not preparing for the worst," says Irene Brown, South Coast Global Medical Center ICU nurse

"I don't have any more to give when I get home, and that's really unfair to my family and myself because I just want to rest," says Vanessa Aguilar

She says it's also unfair to patients. Aguilar had this heartbreaking admission: Some may have made it if we had more resources.

New data suggests that a smaller percentage of patients with COVID-19 are being admitted to hospitals because the nation's healthcare systems are being overwhelmed by the staggering number of new infections.

Two sets of data show that the percentage of those who are admitted to the hospital once testing positive is decreasing.

Hospitals are being forced to tighten their restrictions on who is admitted, suggesting that some patients who may have been hospitalized for treatment during the spring and summer wave are now being turned away as deaths from the virus also increase.

The seven-day average for reported COVID-19 deaths rose to 2,123, the researchers found - surpassing the previous high of 2,116 recorded on April 21.

'Given data drops and spikes on and after Thanksgiving, the seven-day-average is an especially useful metric to watch right now,' their analysts warned.

An Oregon nurse is placed on administrative leave after she posted a TikTok video shunning basic COVID-19 measures.

The since-deleted post from user @Loveiskind05 showed the nurse wearing scrubs and a stethoscope, with the caption, “When my coworkers find out I still travel, don’t wear a mask when I’m out and let my kids have play dates.” A “duet” of the original TikTok remains online.

Users apparently identified the nurse and then alerted her employer, Salem Health.

Wearing a mask is important. For you and those around you. For elected officials? Not so much.

Actually, all the COVID rules are for us, not them. COVID-19, and the accompanying lockdowns, have made it painfully clear: We plebes have to follow the rules; the elites do not.

Start with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last week groveled for forgiveness after being caught attending a large birthday dinner at The French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley. When pictures from the event surfaced, the hypocrisy was glaring: The governor was seen with his wife at a large table full of maskless lobbyists, all sitting in close proximity.

But, hey: You’re not the governor — so if you want to celebrate Thanksgiving in his state, remember: “No more than three households, including your own,” at the gathering, and keep your distance.

Newsom isn’t the only one to live it up while everyone suffers. Gov. Cuomo, for example, is rarely seen in a mask, yet his Twitter feed never stops harassing you to “mask up.” (And, by the way, he’s just thrilled with himself over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis, even though it resulted in more deaths than any other state and, according to The New York Times, seeded the virus throughout the country.)

A few weeks ago, I was supposed to take my sons to an outdoor activity that ended up getting canceled due to weather. We found out about the cancellation when we were halfway there. Before I turned around, I texted my husband that we would be heading home and never got a text back. This wasn’t unusual, as he usually puts his phone on “do not disturb” while he’s working. When we got home, I opened the door to find my husband and his best friend, “Ryan,” completely naked, and having fairly rough sex on our dining room table. They had music blaring, so they didn’t hear us come in, and my sons and I were all in shock and just stood there for a good 30 to 60 seconds before I was able to shut the music off, and they realized what was going on and could cover up. Obviously, this is a bit of a chaotic situation.

Ryan is like an uncle to my kids, has dinner at our house several times a week, has occasionally lived with us, and he and my husband actually work together. My husband and I are planning on staying together and are still trying to figure a lot of things out. Here’s the problem: My younger son (6) is pretty oblivious and thought Uncle Ryan was wrestling with his dad. My middle son (9) is very confused about the mechanics of what we saw (we’ve had the sex talk with him, but in hindsight, we made the mistake of only talking about heterosexual sex). My older son (12) is having a very difficult time. My middle son has a lot of questions that I’m not really sure how to answer, and I’m not sure how much detail I should be going into, and who should be leading this conversation (me? my husband? a doctor?). I’ve been getting phone calls home from my older son’s school. Ever since the incident, he has apparently been making derogatory remarks about gay people, using slurs, and is also refusing to speak to his father (they were previously pretty close). The school is threatening to expel him. We’re on the waitlist for individual and family therapy, but I was wondering if you guys had any advice about what to do with my two older sons?

—What Now?

Even if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced to zero, global temperatures may continue to rise for centuries afterward, according to a scientific study published Thursday.

"The world is already past a point of no return for global warming," the study authors report in the British journal Scientific Reports. The only way to stop the warming, they say, is that "enormous amounts of carbon dioxide have to be extracted from the atmosphere."

The burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to increase and sea levels to rise.

The scientists modeled the effect of greenhouse gas emission reductions on changes in the Earth's climate from 1850 to 2500 and created projections of global temperature and sea level rises.

A company that supplied a federal school lunch program sold juice with high levels of arsenic and used rotten fruit in their product, the FDA charged in a new lawsuit, according to a report.

In the suit, which was filed in federal court in Washington state against the company Valley Processing, food safety inspectors said they found high levels of arsenic in 17 batches of apple juice and two batches of pear juice during a 2019 inspection, The New York Times reported.

Investigators also found high levels of a toxin produced by rotting or moldy apples and pears in the company’s juice, according to the report.

An education watchdog in the U.K. found that some children have regressed due to COVID-19-related school closures and restrictions. A report from Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, says some kids have fallen back in basic skills – and some who were greatly impacted have even forgotten how to use a fork and knife.

One is the "hardest hit" group of young kids. This group has suffered from time out of school and has gone backwards on words and numbers. This group has also reverted to diapers after being potty-trained or lost "basic skills" such as using a knife and fork.

The majority of children are in the middle group and "have slipped back in their learning to varying degrees since schools were closed to most children and movement restricted." According to Spielman, the "lost learning is unarguable, but it is hard to assess."

The Ofsted inspectors said older children have lost their "stamina" for reading. The watchdog also warned that older kids might show loss of concentration when returning to school, noting that fights on social media started during the lockdown are now "being played out in the classroom."

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