Young Adults

She grocery shops with coupons, doesn't have cable TV and wore the same pair of sneakers for eight years. And when she finishes graduate school, she'll have no debt. He owned his first stock at 12, invested in real estate before the boom and contributes the maximum amount he can to his individual retirement account. As a result, at 28, he owns five pieces of property and isn't worried about retirement. They are members of an age group often derided for maxing out credit cards and spending an entire paycheck on a Coach handbag or the latest plasma TV, despite having huge student loans and savings accounts so empty they echo.

For the first time since the epidemic surfaced, AIDS in 1989 became the leading killer of Baltimore's young adults.Statistics compiled recently by the Baltimore City Health Department reveal that infections caused by the AIDS virus accounted for 14.1 percent of deaths to city residents between the ages of 25 and 44 -- surpassing homicides and heart disease, which ranked second and third. The rankings for 1990 have not yet been completed."We're going to see increases all the way through the mid-1990s easily in terms of the number of people dying from AIDS," said Arthur Cohen, AIDS program manager for the city Health Department.

Rachel Tova Minkove, a University of Maryland School of Social Work student who wanted to assist young adults as they fought cancer, died of Hodgkin's lymphoma complications July 29 at her Cheswolde home. She was 28. Born in Baltimore, she was the daughter of Dr. Judah Minkove, an internist, and Judith Fruchter Minkove, a Johns Hopkins Medicine writer and editor. She was raised in Northwest Baltimore and was a 2001 graduate of Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School. She then studied a year in Israel at a Jerusalem seminary school.

NEW YORK -- The use of sleeping pills among children and very young adults rose 85 percent from 2000 to 2004, a study shows, in yet another sign that parents and doctors are increasingly turning to prescription medications to solve childhood health and behavioral problems. Also, about 15 percent of people under age 20 who received sleeping pills were also being given drugs to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, according to the study, by Medco Health Solutions, a managed-care company that makes estimates about medication use in the whole population based on extrapolations from its own data.

For 60 years, the name of Margaret Alexander Edwards has inspired librarians working with young adults. During three decades at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Baltimore librarian became a legendary figure for her efforts to awaken in teen-agers a passion for reading. Now, more than 10 years after her death in 1988, this "patron saint" of young-adult librarians continues to influence the reading lives of teens through a trust fund established in her will to support programs that promote reading for pleasure among young adults.

AMES, Iowa - The ads flopped. The cocktail parties the governor threw came and went. All the mailings touting the virtues of living a long way from the bright lights of big cities never helped, either. Iowa, ever the humble suitor, is still struggling to persuade well-educated young adults to stay put, or move back. But now the state may get brash - by offering them cash. Iowa's legislature has begun debating an extraordinary bill to exempt anyone under 30 from paying state income tax. No other state with the same affliction - an exodus of residents commonly called "brain drain" - has taken such a step.

It's just before 2 a.m., and young men and women are gyrating to pounding music inside the Tunnel nightclub on North Eutaw Street. Within minutes, they begin leaving the club, filling the sidewalks as cars circle the block. The scene usually ends peacefully. But since mid-December, one person has been killed and six people have been shot in incidents that police think were sparked by arguments, fights or dirty looks. Across the region, nightclubs have been a magnet for rowdy teen-agers and young adults who get into fights and sometimes settle disputes with guns or knives.

EASTON -- An early-morning fire fueled by high winds off the Miles River killed three of the seven young adults and teens staying at a 6,600-square-foot estate on the Eastern Shore, fire officials said yesterday. By yesterday afternoon, two bodies had been recovered. At evening, about a dozen people gathered across the street under an oak tree watching firefighters comb through ruins with their hands and shovels for the remains of the third victim. Three of the survivors -- Rosemary Sharpe, 21, of College Park; Ashley McNerney, 21, of Rockville; and Tyler Graf, 20, of Annapolis -- jumped from a second-story window.

Amber Barner has had a summer job through the city's YouthWorks program seven times, every year since she was 14. But this time is different. This time her job will outlast the summer. That twist comes courtesy of Baltimore's fledgling effort to encourage businesses to hire young adults directly through the city's program, rather than simply donate money to help cover their wages elsewhere. Wells Fargo, part of YouthWorks' new Hire One Youth initiative, decided to hire at least one young person for a permanent job. "It's my first time working at a bank," said Barner, 20, a teller at the company's Hamilton branch.

Tavon Stokes, 22, is seldom sick and keeps in shape by running and walking. He figures he has no need to see a doctor. So even though the full-time sales clerk from Baltimore could get health insurance from his employer, RadioShack, Stokes figures he can find far better ways to spend his cash. Health problems "aren't coming up yet, so it's not much of a priority," he said. In the debate over health care reform, Stokes and his peers are known as "invincibles," strong and healthy young adults who have no experience with wallet-crippling illness and feel they have no need for coverage.