Daily Archives: July 28, 2011

On Saturday, July 16, a 19-year-old young man, Kenneth Harding, from Seattle, Wash., came to San Francisco at the wrong time. He rode a transit vehicle to Bayview Hunters Point’s Palou station only to exit and have an encounter with two police officers about paying his $2 fare.

Two of the nation’s most pressing issues involving young people — childhood obesity and violence — are indeed connected. How so? Just ask the Rethinkers. The correlation between unhealthy food choices and crime and violence was at the focal point of this year’s Rethink press conference.

Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the nation’s lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in southeastern D.C. with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America.