"War through innocent eyes"

Steve Chambers of the New Jersey Star-Ledger reported Sunday on the effects of war on children in the Middle East. Reporting from Nahariya, Israel, Chambers examines the most stressful and potentially traumatizing aspects of combat, and draws from mental health experts to consider how parents can ease children's fears.

Children on both sides are at risk, Chambers writes:

THE WAR IS being fought on two fronts, so children are suffering not only in northern Israel, where Hezbollah rockets rain down, and in southern Lebanon, where the Israelis are striking suspected Hezbollah targets. Farther south, there are more young witnesses to war in Palestinian-controlled Gaza, where hostilities began last month after Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and captured another.

In central Gaza, where Israelis and Palestinians fought pitched battles in the streets last week, parents said it was virtually impossible to reassure children who regularly witness death...

"Coping with the worst"

In an article on a new trauma helpline launched throughout Scotland, Herald reporter Beth Pearson explains the need for such resources by telling the story of accident survivor Lynn Harper and through interviews with mental health advocates, including David Alexander, director of the Aberdeen Trauma Research Center (ATRC).

Pearson quotes Alexander:

A LOT OF people, when they've had a bad accident, think: 'Well, I'm not dead, I should pull my socks up' and feel they don't deserve or need treatment. Then some months down the line, which often puzzles their GP, they come forward requiring some form of professional help.

"Questions amid the shock"

Two brothers, ages 14 and 20, were killed by their father Sunday night in Washington Township, N.J. Today, the staff of The Record (of Hackensack, N.J.) gives extensive coverage to the tragedy:

"Questions amid the shock"

Why?

It makes no sense to Thomas Frazza's neighbors, or to John and Kevin Frazza's friends, or to the neighbor who remembers the Frazza family laughing as they walked to the beach from their summer home. ...

"Student's fun-loving spirit was his hallmark"

A day after John Frazza's grisly death -- at the hands of his own father, -- his friends clung fiercely to memories of the Ramapo College student as a do-gooder and jokester. ...

"Quick with a joke, skilled with hockey stick"

Kevin Frazza loved hockey, classic rock music and junk food.

He was sweet and funny, a happy 14-year-old who was as well-liked by his peers as he was by his teachers. ...

"In one stark moment, online diaries turn digital memorials"

John Frazza's page at the social networking site facebook.com identifies him as a fan of "Family Guy," and "Lord of the Rings."

That page and a similar profile at myspace.com sketch a portrait of a typical 20-year-old obsessed with typical things: music, sports, girls.

But the tone of the pages took a sudden somber turn Tuesday as word spread that Frazza and his brother, Kevin, 14, had been fatally shot by their father overnight. ...

"To Catch a Killer"

In the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, reporter DeNeen L. Brown tells the story of Valencia Mohammed, a woman investigating the murder of her sons. Brown writes:

WHAT IS A MOTHER TO DO when two of her sons are shot to death in the District of Columbia, where so many young black boys have been slain in the past decades, one after the other? Enough black boys over the years to fill so many school buses, so many classrooms, vanished like a vanishing tribe?

What is a mother to do when she doesn't think police are moving fast enough? What is a mother to do when her son's so-called friends go silent, won't tell the truth to police, although they saw it all -- right there on Rittenhouse Street, that bright sunny day, 4:30 in the afternoon, rush hour, Thursday, October 28, 2004, watching the killer pump bullets into her son as if he were a target in a video game? When her son sits dying in the driver's seat, engine running, driver's door wide open, loaded .380 semiautomatic pistol on his body, bullet wounds in his chest and neck? People see it, and people close their blinds.

Read the whole story here.