Academics, graduations, interscholastic sports and even first dates are on hold for students around the country as schools and parents take swine flu precautions. Parents are coping with creativity, humor and hope. "Looks like a long week with the kids and activities! Let the games begin. So I guess that means I should get a vacation, too" That's what one mom wrote on Mom2Mom, a popular Texas blog. Its author is Cynthia Wahl Cunningham, who was laid off recently from ...

Swine flu is going to college. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that a Notre Dame student tested positive for swine flu — school officials in Indiana said the undergraduate had not been to Mexico recently — and the University of Delaware has started screening students in a special clinic after four cases of influenza that meet probable definitions for swine flu popped on campus. With hordes of undergrads returning from spring-break trips across the ...

Over the past week, I've been inundated with questions about swine flu, via Facebook, Twitter, CNN blogs and e-mail. So this week I'm empowering people with information about swine flu: how to protect yourself, what all the numbers mean and why you shouldn't freak out. 1. Hasn't swine flu been around for a while Yes. Swine flu was first identified in 1930 when researchers isolated the virus in a pig. In 1976, more than 200 soldiers at Fort ...

Miss California Carrie Prejean, who declared her opposition to same-sex marriage during the Miss USA pageant, will star in a new $1.5 million ad campaign funded by the National Organization for Marriage. He didn't find his mother, but what he did see made him hide under a pile of clothes with other children for days in the prison. "I was shocked when I saw the bodies -- I was thinking maybe my mother was killed like this as well and ...

In Mexico City, the government ran out of surgical masks after handing them out to one of every five residents. Manufacturers and pharmacies in Europe are also reporting a surge in demand for face masks. And a Texas-based surgical mask producer says it's ramping up to meet demand and expects a shortage of masks. But their real value seems to be in keeping people who are already ill from spreading the virus, rather than protecting healthy people, experts ...

On May 4, 2007, Kara Kopetsky, a 17-year-old high school junior in Belton, Missouri, was not having a good day. She forgot one of her textbooks and called home and asked her mom to drop it off at the school office. She also asked her mother to wash her uniform so she could work the 4 p.m. shift at Popeye's Chicken. Later that morning, Kara had an argument with one of her teachers in class, according to police and her ...

So much for the theory that maternity leave and childrearing are responsible for slowing women's climb up the employment ladder. Despite increasing efforts to mint more female professors in recent years, a new report from the Modern Language Association of America shows that women take longer than men to get promoted from associate professor to full professor — regardless of whether they are married or have children. The report, based on a March 2006 survey of 401 English ...

Police searched without success Sunday for a University of Georgia professor who allegedly shot and killed his wife and two other people at a community theater group's reunion Saturday, then fled. Athens-Clarke County police said they have local, regional and national alerts out for George Zinkhan, 57, an endowed marketing professor at the school's Terry College of Business. Police said Zinkhan has relatives in Texas and owns a home in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a nationwide lookout was issued for the ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed cases of swine flu in eight students at a New York preparatory school, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Sunday. The students have had only mild symptoms and none have been hospitalized, he said. Some of the students have already recovered. More than 100 students were absent from school due to flu-like symptoms last week. New York health officials tested samples for eight students Saturday and determined the students were probably suffering from ...

A potentially deadly new strain of the swine flu virus cropped up in more places in the United States and Mexico on Saturday, in what the World Health Organization called "a public health emergency of international concern." The most recent reports Saturday afternoon were of two confirmed cases of the virus in Kansas -- bringing the number of confirmed U.S. cases to 11. Those joined nine confirmed cases in Texas and California and an apparent outbreak at a private school ...