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The Harry Potter books are having a second wave.

Author J.K. Rowling released Sunday a new play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which inspired literary events all over the country.

Sitka Public Library held a tournament in honor of the books’ No. 1 sport – Quidditch, a game played by witches and wizards on flying broomsticks.

So, to adapt the game to our gravity-bound world, the library had to get creative. The sounds of ping-pong balls could be heard hitting the table.

This is tabletop Quidditch. It looks a bit like ping-pong, except students have to bounce balls off the table, through one of three hoops, and into a cup on the other side — make it through the hoop and earn a point, but sink it in the cup, but miss the hoop, then they have to answer a trivia question:

“Who teaches defense against the Dark Arts in Harry Potter’s 3rd year at Hogwarts.”

“Professor R. J. Lupin”

The students are on their game. But the biggest fan here may be the librarian, herself. Maite Lorente has always been a big fan of everyone’s favorite bespectacled, boy-wizard. So much so, she named her dog after him.

“When the seventh book finally was published — that same summer, my dog was born, and the poor thing has to carry the name of Harry Potter forever, because it’s a passion of mine,” Lorente said.

So when she heard that the theme for summer reading programs across the country was “On your mark, get set, read!” encouraging kids to go outdoors and be active, she just knew she had to incorporate the wizarding world’s favorite pastime.

“At the beginning we wanted to do an outdoors one, but that would have required a lot of time, so we just decided to go for an indoors Quidditch tournament,” she said.

She researched her options online, and transformed a ping-pong table into a Quidditch arena. Players have to hold onto a real broom with one hand while they toss the ping-pong quaffles with the other. But there was a bit of confusion about the brooms at the beginning.

“There was a moment where I realized that I had to explain to them that we were not going to be flying with brooms,” Lorente said. “And I think some of them got a little bit disappointed. But I just explained to them that librarians can do almost everything, but to this date none of us have gotten the secret of how to fly with a broom yet.”

The kids didn’t end up being too disappointed. They got pretty into it. Elliot played for Gryffindor, and he said there were a few moments when he wondered whether they’d make it to the end of the tournament.

“It was pretty fun and pretty tense,” he said. “Sometimes I felt like whenever one team got the snitch, I got really scared wishing they won’t get it into the cup. I was glad Slytherin didn’t win that round. They were doing pretty good, that’s why I didn’t want them to win that, so we had an easier time.”

It’s easy to lionize Gryffindor, but each house has its merits. Ravenclaw is smart, Hufflepuff is kind and Slytherin is ambitious.

“I love when they come and they say ‘I want to be in the Hufflepuff house,” Lorente said. You assumed that Gryffindor was going to be filled, and that was the case, right away. When I have a Ravenclaw or a Hufflepuff or a Slytherin come in, you know that makes my day.”

Big Delta resident Tom Gorman said a small dam he built earlier this year to protect his home from the meandering Tanana River held steady over the past couple of weeks as the river rose to near-flood level, due to recent rains.

Gorman now hopes the river falls quickly enough to allow him to finish work on the dam before snow flies.

Gorman stands at the edge of a 20-foot-wide slough off the Tanana River that runs along the foot of a ridge on which he built his house about seven years ago and said this isn’t how it looked back then.

“Last year, it was dry!” Gorman said.

A couple dozen trees used to grow in and around the area, Gorman said, which served as a sort of buffer between his big three-story house and the Tanana River some 45 feet away. Until January, that is, when an ice dam on the Tanana diverted a torrent of water into the area that tore out the trees and gouged into the riverbank, threatening to undercut the ridge where his house sits.

“And that just came in and just took ’em out, one at a time – pow! Two hours later, another one – bam!” he said. “It just got behind ’em, the erosion behind ’em, and just ripped ’em up.”

That was near the beginning of an ordeal that lasted for several weeks, as Gorman and a small army of friends, neighbors, contractors and others tried to bust up the pile of thick ice slabs.

They attempted to melt it with a de-icing solution; they tried to bust it up with a 5,000-pound weight dropped from a helicopter; they even detonated explosives to blast it open. Nothing worked.

“No – well, not on 3-, 4-foot (thick) ice,” Gorman said. “That’s what you had over here, all the way across.”

Gorman said state and federal officials for the most part supported his effort to save the house. He didn’t get any help from his homeowner’s insurance company, he said, but he got lots from dozens of volunteers from all around the area.

“The community’s helped me out,” Gorman said, “And they really pulled together.”

Gorman, a retiree from Texas, said the cost of trying to break the ice jam further strained his finances, which he’d already deeply tapped to buy the land and, in 2009, build a house for his family, which includes his wife and elderly mom, disabled son and daughter with kids.

Why did he build his dream house so close to the river? Gorman said he’s been asked many times:

“We were safe,” he said, “we were really safe when we built this house.”

Gorman followed advice on where to build given by his contractor and two neighbors, both of whom have lived along that stretch of the river for more than 40 years. But the ice-jam backup surprised everyone, he said as he shows photos of river water tearing through the slough and frantic efforts to slow its destruction.

“It came around this way, and it starts cutting in here,” he said. “It cut in here and fell down. It cut and just headed right toward the house.”

When the ice jam finally gave way, he and his had crew a chance to bring in equipment to shore up 150 feet of riverbank with big rocks, Gorman said, and to build an 8-foot-tall dam across the slough.

“What this dam did here was to really stop the current,” Gorman said. “Once the current was stopped, then I could get in here and do something.”

When the river rose a couple of weeks ago, he saw that the dam, which is built of interlocking concrete barriers, wasn’t quite high enough. So he laid a course of sandbags on top it to slow the flow to trickle.

“It’s holding,” Gorman said, “but it’s not done. It has to be completed.”

But he can’t bring equipment back in until the river drops and the area dries out.

“The water has got to go down, because what happens is you put the equipment down there and it’s so soft that it’s going to push the dam away,” Gorman said.

Gorman said that may not happen before the first snow flies two or three months from now. He said he’d prefer to do the work before winter sets in, but if he runs out of time, he’ll pay the extra cost of doing the work in the winter to save his home.

Among Gov. Bill Walker’s list of vetoes last week was what looks like $6.5 million in cuts to the Department of Health & Social Services. One is slated for substance abuse treatment pilot programs. Another for children’s services. But here’s the catch — even with those cuts, the department will still be getting extra money for those services next year.

When setting the FY17 budget, the legislature included some additional funds over FY16. Including $11 million to create new substance abuse treatment programs around the state, like detox centers and residential treatment programs. Division of Behavioral Health Director Randall Burns said he was still happy even when the governor cut that down to $6 million.

“I think any additional funding that the legislature and the governor are willing to provide for new substance abuse services in Alaskan communities is very positive news,” Burns said in a phone interview.

The Office of Children’s Services will see a positive boost as well. The legislature had given OCS an additional $2.3 million on top of their regular budget for two purposes: preventative programs that help families work through problems and stay together, and reunification programs to help restore families if kids are put into foster care. Of that, $1.7 million will stay in the budget.

“They’re really all funds to help supplement and enhance what the OCS caseworker is doing and oftentimes, with the high workload, isn’t able to do as much as we’d like to do,” explained OCS Director Christy Lawton. “So these services really help to accelerate services we can offer.” She said she was grateful that most of the money remained in the budget.

The funding will be used to expand current programs and try innovative strategies.

The $1 million cut to child care benefits is a reduction from the current budget, but the department does not see it impacting services. There is not a wait list for child care assistance.

Today’s generation of schoolchildren looks much different than one just a few decades ago. Nonwhites are expected to become the majority of the nation’s children by 2020, as our colleague Bill Chappell reported last year. This is now the reality among the very youngest Americans: babies.

Babies of color now outnumber non-Hispanic white babies (1 year or younger), according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The newest estimate shows that on July 1, 2015, the population of racial or ethnic minority babies was 50.2 percent.

But the scales may have actually tipped in 2013 — the Census Bureau often revises past population estimates as new data become available. That means the first of these babies are now preschool-aged.

We’ve already been seeing this shift in U.S. schools: the 2014-15 school year marked the first time that minority student enrollment in public schools surpassed that of white students.

NPR could not reach any babies for comment.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Bullying and cyberbullying are major risk factors for teen suicide. And both the bullies and their victims are at risk.

That’s according to a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics that urges pediatricians and family doctors to routinely screen teenagers for suicide risks.

“Pediatricians need to be aware of the problem overall,” says Benjamin Shain, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and lead author of the report published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics. “They should be screening for things like mood disorders, substance abuse as well as bullying.”

Suicide is the number two cause of death of teenagers, after accidents including car crashes and accidental overdoses. The leading methods of suicide were suffocation and guns.

A CDC survey last year found that 17 percent of teens in high school said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months, and 2.7 percent had made an attempt that resulted in an injury.

Shain calls those numbers “phenomenal.”

The AAP report says there is a clear relationship between bullying and suicide thoughts and attempts.

Suicidal ideation and behavior were increased in victims and bullies and were highest in people who were both bullies and victims of bullying, the report says.

And cyberbullying increased suicide attempts as much as face-to-face bullying.

Shain tells Shots that online bullying is particularly damaging because it’s hard for the victim to get away from it.

“It’s in black and white, you can see it, everyone else can see it, it doesn’t go away,” he says. “You’re not safe in your own house.”

The report recommends doctors talk with teens directly about suicide risk factors, including bullying, drug and alcohol abuse, mood disorders and physical or sexual abuse.

The report includes suggested dialog and questions for doctors to ask their teenage patients and said the children should be interviewed alone, away from their parents.

“Physicians, including pediatricians, can play a critical role in identifying mental health conditions and in preventing suicide,” Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said in a statement.

She recommends that doctors get training in how to identify teens who may be thinking of killing themselves.

Beyond bullying, the effect of the Internet on suicide risk was mixed. The report found that teenagers who spend more than five hours a day online are a greater risk of trying to kill themselves.

But the the Web provides a cushion of sorts, too.

Teens who search the term “suicide” online are much more likely to find information on suicide prevention, help lines and other support than web sites that support or describe suicide, the report found.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The federal government, which spends billions of dollars each year covering unintended pregnancies, is encouraging states to adopt policies that might boost the number of Medicaid enrollees who use long-acting, reversible contraceptives.

LARCs, as they are known, “possess a number of advantages,” Vikki Wachino, deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, wrote to state programs in a recent bulletin. “They are cost-effective, have high efficacy and continuation rates, require minimal maintenance, and are rated highest in patient satisfaction.”

And, Wachino stressed, “more can be done to increase this form of contraception.”

The federal push reflects the continuing concern over the nation’s rate of unintended pregnancies, which is one of the highest among developed countries. The costs are significant not only for the families involved but also for the federal and state governments. In 2010, the latest year for which data are available, the federal government spent $14.6 billion and states another $6.4 billion on unplanned pregnancies. (Southern states were especially affected. In Mississippi, public programs covered 82 percent of such pregnancies.)

LARCs are considered a key way to help reduce all of those numbers. They include intrauterine devices and under-the-skin hormonal implants that, once in place, provide nearly complete protection against pregnancy for three to 10 years. In contrast, birth control pills are about 90 percent effective and must be taken daily.

Under Medicaid, the state/federal health program for low-income people, states must cover family planning services for women and men without charge. Although they have considerable latitude in determining which services, they’ve generally included most methods of birth control, said Adam Sonfield, a senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and advocacy organization that focuses on reproductive and sexual health.

Yet overall adoption of long-acting contraceptives has been slow in state Medicaid programs. In 2012, about 11 percent of low-income beneficiaries used a LARC, similar to the percentage of U.S. women overall.

Access in programs can be hampered by policies related to how LARCs are paid for and how services are provided, the CMS bulletin noted. It highlighted how some states are making changes to expand LARC use.

For example, it often is more efficient for a woman who has just delivered a baby to have an IUD inserted while she’s still at the hospital rather than wait until a postpartum visit several weeks later. But providers generally receive a bundled payment for labor and delivery services under Medicaid — and that doesn’t include IUD insertion. A dozen states — Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, New York and South Carolina, according to the CMS bulletin — have implemented policies that now reimburse providers separately for inserting an IUD or hormonal implant right after a woman gives birth.

Another hurdle is the high up-front cost of long-acting contraceptives. This can be addressed by increasing payment rates to doctors as an incentive for them buying and stocking the devices, the bulletin noted.

Some state programs require that Medicaid participants first try a different contraceptive method before moving to a LARC, a practice referred to as step therapy. Or they require a plan’s prior authorization, which can delay or even block women from getting that method. Both minimize use.

South Carolina, which in 2011 had the 12^th highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, became the first Medicaid program to change its policy to reimburse providers for placement of LARCs immediately after delivery. The state now encourages the use of LARCs in outpatient settings by allowing the devices to be ordered by a physician but billed directly to Medicaid. In addition, it has eliminated prior authorization and step therapy as requirements.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, published a study last week calling for the increased use of LARCs for Medicaid enrollees both right after delivery as well as following abortion. It’s just one of a growing number of advocates, starting two years ago with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and continuing with the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality.

“The research is clear, LARC is the most effective and, over time, the least expensive reversible contraceptive method,” the nonprofits NICHQ and the the National Academy for State Health Policy stated in an issues brief last month. “Unplanned pregnancies are both medically difficult, with higher rates of preterm birth and low-birth weight babies, and incredibly costly. Wider adoption of LARC is a significant opportunity for states to reduce unnecessary expenditures in Medicaid programs.”

A recently published rule for managed care organizations that run many Medicaid programs also addressed LARCs. It said states must offer enrollees a choice of contraceptive methods and can’t require prior authorization or step therapy, said Mara Gandal-Powers, counsel for health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center.

“The language reinforces women’s access to the birth control method of their choice,” she said.

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Feds Urge State Medicaid Programs To Encourage Long-Acting Contraceptives