A 14-year-old school student has been termed "America's top young scientist" for creating a bar of soap that may be effective in the treatment of melanoma, a skin cancer that affects roughly 100,000 individuals in the United States each year and kills approximately 8,000. Heman Bekele, a ninth-grader from Annandale, Virginia, was selected over nine other finalists for the award, reports The Guardian. Also read: The next big advance in cancer treatment could be a vaccine “Curing cancer, one bar of soap at a time,” he said in his submission. “I have always been interested in biology and technology, and this challenge gave me the perfect platform to showcase my ideas,” he added. He submitted his soap idea, "skin cancer treating soap," produced from ingredients that may reawaken dendritic cells that defend human skin, allowing them to combat cancer cells. Bekele stated in a video for the 3M Young Scientist Challenge that he believes "that young minds can make a positive impact on the world," the report said. Also read: New AI model can accurately diagnose cancer: Study Bekele's inspiration stemmed from his childhood in Ethiopia, where he saw people continually labouring under the blazing sun. “I wanted to make my idea something that not only was great in terms of science but also could be accessible to as many people as possible.” Skin cancer is quite common, according to the American Cancer Society, with melanoma accounting for only 1 percent, yet causing the bulk of skin cancer deaths, the report also said. Also read; Ancient viruses can help fight cancer, scientists say According to the association, melanoma rates have been significantly increasing over the last few decades, particularly among women over 50, and it is more than 20 times more prevalent in white people than in black people. At the same time, owing to breakthroughs in therapy, melanoma death rates have decreased over the last decade. After receiving the award, Bekele told the judging panel that he hoped the soap would become a "symbol of hope, accessibility, and a world where skin cancer treatment is within everyone's reach."

A 6-year-old student shot and wounded a teacher at his school in Virginia during an altercation inside a first-grade classroom Friday, police and school officials in the city of Newport News said. Experts said a school shooting involving a 6-year-old is extremely rare, although not unheard of, while Virginia law limits the ways in which a child that age can be punished for such a crime. No students were injured in the shooting at Richneck Elementary School, police said. The teacher — a woman in her 30s — suffered life-threatening injuries. Her condition had improved somewhat by late afternoon, Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew said. “We did not have a situation where someone was going around the school shooting,” Drew told reporters, later adding that the gunshot was not an accident. Drew said the student and teacher had known each other in a classroom setting. He said the boy had a handgun in the classroom, and investigators were trying to figure out where he obtained it. The police chief did not provide further details about the shooting, the altercation or what happened inside the school. Joselin Glover, whose son is in fourth grade, told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper she got a text from the school stating that one person was shot and another was in custody. “My heart stopped,” she said. “I was freaking out, very nervous. Just wondering if that one person was my son.” Also Read: 8 found fatally shot in Utah home, including 5 children Carlos, her 9-year-old, was at recess. But he said he and his classmates were soon holed up in the back of a classroom. “Most of the whole class was crying,” Carlos told the newspaper. Parents and students were reunited at a gymnasium door, Newport News Public Schools said via Facebook. The police chief did not specifically address questions about whether authorities were in touch with the boy’s parents, but said members of the police department were handling that investigation. “We have been in contact with our commonwealth’s attorney (local prosecutor) and some other entities to help us best get services to this young man,” Drew said. Newport News is a city of about 185,000 people in southeastern Virginia known for its shipyard, which builds the nation’s aircraft carriers and other U.S. Navy vessels. Richneck has about 550 students who are in kindergarten through fifth grade, according to the Virginia Department of Education’s website. School officials have already said that there will be no classes at the school on Monday. “Today our students got a lesson in gun violence,” said George Parker III, Newport News schools superintendent, “and what guns can do to disrupt, not only an educational environment, but also a family, a community.” Virginia law does not allow 6-year-olds to be tried as adults In addition, a 6-year-old is too young to be committed to the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice if found guilty. A juvenile judge would have authority, though, to revoke a parent’s custody and place a child under the purview of the Department of Social Services. A school shooting involving a 6-year-old is extremely rare, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Boston’s Northeastern University. Fox told The Associated Press Friday evening that he could think of one previous incident involving a child that age. In 2000, a 6-year-old boy fired a bullet from a .32-caliber gun inside Buell Elementary near Flint, Michigan, 60 miles (96 kilometers) from Detroit, striking 6-year-old Kayla Rolland in the neck, according to an AP article from the time. She died a half-hour later. Fox analyzed school shooting data sets going back to 1970 from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, which is located at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He said the data listed school shootings involving children ages 7, 8, 9 and older, but not 6-year-olds. Another factor that stands out about the Virginia shooting is that it occurred in a classroom, Fox said. Many occur outside a school building where students are unsupervised. From 2010 through 2021, there were more than 800 school-related shootings in K-12 schools that involved 1,149 victims. Thirty percent of those occurred in the school building, said Fox, who published the 2010 book, “Violence and Security on Campus: From Preschool Through College.” “There are students who killed teachers, more typically high school students,” Fox said. “I don’t know of other cases where a 6-year-old shot a teacher.” ___ Barakat reported from Falls Church, Virginia.

  RICHMOND, Va. (AP/UNB) — Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race early Wednesday, tapping into culture war fights over schools and race to unite former President Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters with enough suburban voters to become the first Republican to win statewide office here in a dozen years. The 54-year-old Youngkin’s defeat of Democrat Terry McAuliffe marked a sharp turnabout in a state that had shifted to the left over the past decade and which President Joe Biden captured by 10 points in 2020. And with the party stinging from that loss, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey was in a dead heat to win reelection in a state Biden won by 15. The elections were the first major tests of voter sentiment since Biden took office. And they offered stern warnings heading into next year’s midterms that the party’s thin majority in Congress was in peril. “This is the spirit of Virginia coming together like never before,” Youngkin told cheering supporters in a hotel ballroom in Chantilly, about 25 miles west of Washington. AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” blared from speakers as the race was called after midnight. Youngkin promised to lead not just from the state capital but with “a vision where Virginians’ power, the power that has historically resided in the marble halls in Richmond is spread out, spread out into the kitchen tables that are held together with the bond and the spirit of liberty and freedom.” A political neophyte, Youngkin was able to take advantage of apparent apathy among core Democratic voters fatigued by years of elections that were seen as must-wins. He successfully portrayed McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor, Democratic National Committee chairman and close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, as part of an elite class of politicians. He also seized on a late-stage stumble by McAuliffe, who during a debate performance suggested parents should have a minimal role in shaping school curriculums. Perhaps most significantly, Youngkin prevailed in a task that has stumped scores of Republicans before him: attracting Trump’s base while also appealing to suburban voters who were repelled by the former president’s divisive behavior. During the campaign, Youngkin stated his support for “election integrity,” a nod at Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, while also focusing on education and business-friendly policies. He never campaigned in person with Trump, successfully challenging McAuliffe’s effort to cast him as a clone of the former president. That approach could provide a model for Republicans competing in future races that feature significant numbers of Democratic or independent voters. Elsewhere in the country Tuesday, mayoral contests helped shape the leadership of some of the nation’s largest cities. Democratic former police captain Eric Adams won in New York, and Boston voters elected City Councilor Michelle Wu, the city’s first female Asian American mayor. Cincinnati is getting its first Asian American mayor, Aftab Pureval. Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot initiative that sought to overhaul policing in their city, where George Floyd was killed by a white police officer on Memorial Day 2020, sparking the largest wave of protests against racial injustice in generations. The initiative would have replaced the police force with a Department of Public Safety charged with undertaking “a comprehensive public health” approach to policing. In the New Jersey governor’s race, Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli posted a surprisingly strong showing, campaigning on issues including taxes and opposition to pandemic mask and vaccination mandates. Incumbent Gov. Murphy was trying to become the first Democrat reelected to the office in 44 years. But no other contest in this off-year election season received the level of national attention — and money — as the governor’s race in Virginia, a state with broad swaths of college-educated suburban voters who are increasingly influential in swaying control of Congress and the White House. A former co-CEO at the Carlyle Group with a lanky, 6′6″ build that once made him a reserve forward on Rice University’s basketball team, Youngkin poured vast amounts of his personal fortune into a campaign that spent more than $59 million. Favoring fleece vests, Youngkin sought to cut the image of a genial suburban dad. Youngkin ran confidently on a conservative platform. He opposed a major clean energy mandate the state passed two years ago and objected to abortion in most circumstances. He also backed a business-friendly approach to the state’s economy, opposed mask and vaccine mandates, promised to expand Virginia’s limited charter schools and ban critical race theory, an academic framework that centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people. In recent months, it has become a catch-all political buzzword for any teaching in schools about race and American history. McAuliffe tried to energize the Democratic base by highlighting abortion, denouncing a new Texas law that largely banned the procedure and warning that Youngkin would seek to implement similar restrictions. Youngkin didn’t discuss abortion much publicly, and a liberal activist caught him on tape saying the issue couldn’t help him during the campaign. He said an election win would allow the party to “start going on offense” on the issue. While McAuliffe pulled on the star power of a host of national Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and ex-Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams, Youngkin largely campaigned on his own, focusing on issues he said were important to Virginians. Youngkin also proved perhaps most successful in deflecting McAuliffe’s efforts to tie him to Trump and the former president’s divisive political style. Polls showed the race tightening after McAuliffe said during a late September debate that he didn’t think “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” That prompted Youngkin to run hundreds of TV ads on the statement and to focus on his own pledges to make school curricula less “un-American” and to overhaul policies on transgender students and school bathrooms. The race took an especially bitter turn last week, when Youngkin ran an ad featuring a mother and GOP activist who eight years ago led an effort to ban “Beloved,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, from classrooms. McAuliffe accused Youngkin of uncorking a “racist dog whistle,” but Youngkin said Virginia parents knew what was really at stake — and so did families across the country. That was a nod to how tapping into parental activism could work for the GOP next year and in future election cycles. “America is watching Virginia,” Youngkin said as part of his closing argument. “And America needs us to vote for them too.”    

Jill Biden is going back to her whiteboard. After months of teaching writing and English to community college students in boxes on a computer screen, the first lady resumes teaching in person Tuesday from a classroom at Northern Virginia Community College, where she has worked since 2009. She is the first first lady to leave the White House and log hours at a full-time job. “There are some things you just can’t replace, and I can’t wait to get back in the classroom,” she recently told Good Housekeeping magazine. Read:Jill Biden, Joe's chief protector, stepping up as first lady The first lady has been anxious to see her students in person after more than a year of virtual teaching brought on by a pandemic that continues to challenge the Biden administration. A working first lady is a “big deal,” said Tammy Vigil, a Boston University communications professor who wrote a book about first ladies Michelle Obama and Melania Trump. The nation’s early first ladies did not work outside the home, especially when home was the White House. They supported their husbands, raised children and performed the role of hostess. Some first ladies acted as special ambassadors for their husbands. Eleanor Roosevelt was especially active, traveling around the U.S. and reporting back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose activities were limited by polio. She advocated for the poor, minorities and other disadvantaged people, and began writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column from the White House. More recent first ladies, like Laura Bush, who was an elementary school teacher and librarian, had stopped working outside the home after having children and were not employed when their husbands were elected. Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama were working mothers who decided against continuing their careers in the White House. Jill Biden, 70, is forging a new path for herself and her successors. The first lady has said she always wanted to be a career woman. She taught at the Virginia community college during the eight years that her husband was vice president and was not about to let the added responsibility of being first lady force her to give up a career she so closely identifies with. “Teaching isn’t just what I do. It’s who I am,” she says. Women made up nearly half, or 47%, of the U.S. labor force in 2019, according to Catalyst, a women’s workplace advocacy group. Leaders of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions are pleased that one of their own is now in a position to help influence the administration’s education policies and raise the profile of a profession in which many have long felt unappreciated. “She sees it up close and personally and now, in the position as first lady, not only does she give voice to that from a place of understanding, she has an opportunity to create a platform and to have influence,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. Read:White House upgrade: First lady's done a lot with the place President Joe Biden told teachers attending the NEA’s annual meeting that he learned about what they were going through by watching his wife as she learned how to teach online. “It gave me an appreciation firsthand that I thought I had, but I wouldn’t have had had I not seen it,” he said at the July meeting. “And then going out and teaching — she was working four or five hours a day, getting ready to teach, putting her lesson plans together ... a different way.” In 1976, a year after she met and began dating then-U.S. Sen. Biden, Jill Biden started teaching English at a Roman Catholic high school in Wilmington, Delaware. She later taught at a psychiatric hospital and at Delaware Technical Community College. She earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate in educational leadership during those years. After Joe Biden became vice president in 2009, she joined the faculty at Northern Virginia Community College. She continued to teach there after he left office and throughout his 2020 presidential campaign, including virtually after the pandemic hit. Her virtual teaching continued as first lady, from her office in the White House East Wing or hotel rooms when she traveled to promote administration policies. She grades papers on flights. “It shatters the norms of what first ladies do,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Jill Biden tries to keep her political identity out of the classroom and has said that many of her former students in Virginia had no idea she was married to the vice president. She also did not talk about it. Secret Service agents accompanied her for security, but she had them dress casually and tote backpacks in an attempt to blend into the campus environment. But being first lady, for which there is no job description or pay, comes with a much higher level of visibility, security and scrutiny. First ladies make numerous public appearances — with or without the president — to promote their own or the president’s issues, garnering coverage from national and local news media. Vogue magazine splashed the first lady on the cover of its August issue. Read: Michelle Obama, Mia Hamm among 9 chosen for Women's HOF Jill Biden will teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with travel on days when she is not in the classroom. Her employer, the commonwealth of Virginia, requires everyone to wear face coverings indoors on Northern Virginia Community College campuses, regardless of vaccination status. The first lady is fully vaccinated. The school is offering fall classes in a variety of formats, including fully remote, in-person on campus and a hybrid. Anne M. Kress, president of Northern Virginia Community College, said she looked forward to welcoming the students and faculty, including Jill Biden, for the fall semester and expressed gratitude for their commitment to “excellence in instruction and equity in opportunity.” “Their belief in our students is deep, real, and transformational,” Kress said.

Tens of thousands of gun-rights activists from around the country rallied peacefully at the Virginia Capitol on Monday to protest plans by the state's Democratic leadership to pass gun-control legislation — a move that has become a key flash point in the national debate over gun violence.

Virginia's capital city is bracing for the expected arrival of thousands of gun-rights activists and other groups that have vowed to descend on Richmond to protest Democrats' plans to pass gun-control legislation.