Young People

Chinese leader no longer absent BEIJING - The reappearance Saturday of Xi Jinping, a top Chinese leader who had vanished from public view, removes one question mark facing the Communist Party, but a wave of protests against Japan is a sign that internal power struggles are far from over. On Saturday, diplomatic tensions boiled over, with hundreds of demonstrators throwing rocks and eggs at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, while smaller protests erupted in up to 40 other Chinese cities.

THE ONLY solace in all these losses for the Los Angeles Dodgers is that they aren't losing any ground in the NL wild-card race. Los Angeles remained a game behind St. Louis, with the teams beginning a four-game series Thursday night at Dodger Stadium. Going into that pivotal matchup, the Dodgers had lost six of seven and the Cardinals 11 of their last 15. "I'm sure people are getting tired of hearing me say it, but we have to turn the page," Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said.

TRENTON - A sharply divided New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday made it harder for prosecutors to try juvenile defendants in adult court. The high court's 3-2 ruling stemmed from a case in which three juveniles were accused of beating and robbing a Woodbridge man in 2009. The majority concluded the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office didn't adequately show that trying the three in adult court - which would subject them to longer sentences if convicted - was necessary for deterrence.

* BREAKING AMISH. 10 p.m. Sunday, TLC. ANYONE WHO THINKS a TV-free household is the answer to keeping kids from following in Snooki's shaky footsteps might want to take a lesson from the Amish, for whom "reality" television's become a plague their Anabaptist ancestors couldn't anticipate. Turns out it's not all that easy to keep some of them, at least, down on the farm once there's a video camera in their faces. On Sunday, TLC's "Breaking Amish" becomes the latest show to try to document what happens when a small group of young people brought up for the most part without electricity - or even zippers - moves to the big city.

High noon, downtown Camden. The young blond woman staggering along Broadway in ultrashort shorts makes it clear she doesn't want any help. But a block away, Maxine Bennett eagerly waves to the Covenant House van I'm riding in. The privately funded nonprofit agency "really got me what I needed," says Bennett, 22, who on this occasion needs a ride to her Fairview home with daughter, Paris, 1. "Things are getting better," Maxine says as...

This letter on pornography and business ethics - written by two public intellectuals, one a Christian, the other a Muslim - was sent to hotel industry executives last month and then released publicly at www.thePublicDiscourse.com . Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is cofounder and a member of the faculty of Zaytuna College in California We write to...

To their young charges, they're the slightly older arbiters of fun in the summer. The camp counselor is the hip role model who is cool to look up to. But the young people whose job it is to take care of campers during the summer say their jobs are about more than supervising the basketball game or taking the easy path to summer employment. Their role has increasing responsibility and requires training that has become more extensive and varied. "We see the kid whose parents are going through a divorce, or the kid coming in the same clothes day after day. Sometimes we see pain and suffering that they may be going through at home," said Josh Watters, 24, a counselor at the Diamond Ridge day camp in Jamison.

As an emergency-room physician, I am used to dealing with the results of violent attacks. But after many years of stitching up injured young people, I understand ever more urgently that this is not enough. We must break the cycle of violence. We can start by intervening in hospital emergency rooms, the place where we engage victims right after someone has tried to kill them. Every year, thousands of Philadelphians are shot, stabbed, or beaten. Some of them die. In 2011, there were 324 homicides, almost one a day, with nearly half the victims younger than 25 and more than 80 percent of them African American males.

No sooner had the NCAA announced sanctions against Penn State than a legion of commentators emerged to insist that they were too harsh because they would strike innocents as well as wrongdoers. One critic wondered "whether a $60 million fine is worth destroying all the good Penn State has produced. " According to another, the NCAA "hurt dozens of young students who had nothing to do with this whatsoever. " Let's grant that the cost of the penalties will fall on people who don't deserve them.

BERNADETTE Maida was only 17 when she entered the orbit of the remarkable Gilbert C. Johnson. It would be a life-changing experience for the young woman. He was in charge of the non-pathology side of Chestnut Hill Hospital's laboratory and ran the technician-training program, which Bernadette joined. She also was his student at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science. She credits him with putting her career on a path that led to executive positions in the pharmaceutical industry.