Blog Posts by Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine

There's a science to shopping at Target. Here's how to get the best bargains. (Photo: Thinkstock)Between back-to-school sales and everyday bargains, Target is an all-purpose shopping destination for plenty of people. But there's a science to shopping at Target, and these tips and tricks can help you save even more money.

Related: Target's 2012 fall preview

Just because something is on clearance at Target doesn't necessarily mean that's as low as the price will go. There's a lot of information to be found on those little red clearance stickers that can help you determine if it's the best deal you can get. In the bottom-left corner of the tag is the item's original price. In the bottom-right corner is the current sale price. And in the top-right corner is the percentage off. Regular prices at Target always end in a "9," savvy shoppers have noted, but clearance items can be priced at 15 percent, 30 percent, 70 percent, 75 percent, or even 90 percent off.

Learn to decipher Target's clearance price tags to get even better bargains.Food, furniture, and electronics generally don't drop by more than 15 percent, some savvy shoppers point out, but holiday items

What's hot for back to school 2012? Bright colors, among other things. (Photo: Thinkstock)Back-to-school spending is expected to top $500 per shopper, a consumer survey says, but just what are the things kids are clamoring for this season?

Related: 10 tips for beating back-to-school stress

Parents may assume that their kids want new clothes to kick off the school year, but according to a Harris Interactive survey conducted for Ebates.com in June, most kids -- 42 percent -- said what they really wanted was a tablet computer or a new smartphone. Pre-teens are most likely to want some sort of high-tech gadget, even though their age group is less likely to be allowed to bring smartphones to school.

Out of the 2,208 parents surveyed by Ebates, 43 percent said that they planned to do their back-to-school shopping in August, 5 percent said that they wait until September to stock up, and just 30 percent have started scoping out the back-to-school sales already. More parents than ever before plan to shop online, paying special attention to free-shipping deals, the National

White House Assistant Chef Sam Kass chats with 8-year-old Avery McNew from Michigan just before the first-ever Kids' State Dinner at the White House on Aug. 20. (Photo: YouTube/White House)While parents are looking for lunch box inspiration this back-to-school season, some kids are coming up with creative, inspiring recipes that even adults would be happy to eat.

Eight- to 12-year-olds from all over the country submitted recipes for The Healthy Lunchtime Challenge, a collaboration between the White House and Epicurious.com, and the winners were in Washington, D.C., on Monday to celebrate with First Lady Michelle Obama. The first-ever Kids State Dinner (which was actually a luncheon) featured some of the winning recipes, which ranged from pasta dishes and healthier hamburgers to salmon wraps and quinoa salads.

"10-year-olds can come up with this stuff," said Marshall Reed, 12, co-author with his mom of "Portion Size Me" and one of the contest's judges. "I didn't even know what quinoa was until I started doing this."

"We asked them to design a dish that was healthy, affordable, and tasty -- and which met the nutritional guidelines set up by the U.S.

When people say that the GOP has launched a War on Women, things like this are at the core of their complaint: Rick Santorum saying that rape victims who get pregnant should "make the best out of a bad situation." Georgia state Representative Terry England comparing women to farm animals. And now, Republican Congressman Todd Akin insisting that allowing abortion in cases of rape is unnecessary because women who are "legitimately raped" don't get pregnant.

Is the Republican party really anti-women?

"First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare," Akin told KTVI-TV, a Fox affiliate in St. Louis, in an interview broadcast on Sunday. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Dr. Temple Grandin in 2011. (Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images)The key to helping kids with autism succeed in school is to stay positive and focus on building their strengths, according to Dr. Temple Grandin, a scientist, inventor, and educator who also has autism herself.

Related: "He doesn't look autistic" and other misconceptions about autism

"Special educators need to look at what a child can do instead of what he/she cannot do," she writes at Take Part. "An emphasis on deficits should not get to the point where building the area of strength gets neglected."

After Grandin was diagnosed with autism in 1950, her parents were told that she should be institutionalized. Now a successful author, inventor, designer, and teacher with a bachelors degree in psychology and both a masters degree and a Ph.D. in animal science, she says that it is important for parents to look past the labels and discover what skills a child really has. In Grandin's case, her talent was art.

"I heard about sad cases where a teacher forbids an elementary school child to

When Boston-resident Jack Cushman decided to propose to Teresa Elsey, his girlfriend of nearly three years, he was certain that she'd say yes. So all that was left to figure out was how he'd make the moment memorable.

"Since I wasn't too nervous about the question itself, I decided to come up with a ridiculously complicated plan to worry about instead," Cushman wrote in an essay for The Huffington Post.

"My first thought was just to get a bunch of strangers to give Teresa flowers as she was coming home from work, people in all kinds of improbable places," he told Yahoo! Shine in an interview. "I wanted to create a world where good things happen for no reason, a world full of bounty. I just loved the idea of just being able to give that to her."

Related: Why do people propose in public?

When she suggested a date to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, where they'd had their first date back in 2009, the timing seemed perfect. He enlisted his best friend and his brothers

Do you allow your children to fly by themselves?It's a perennial problem for parents of summer campers and for divorced parents who share custody of their kids but live far away from one another: Do you let your child fly by themselves?

Related: 5 ways to prepare your child to fly alone

Annie and Perry Klebahn dropped their 10-year-old daughter, Phoebe, off at the San Francisco airport on June 30th for her first-ever solo trip to sleep-away camp in Michigan. They paid the $99 unaccompanied minor fee to United Airlines and listened as United personnel reassured Phoebe that she would have someone with her at all times and reminded her to only go with someone wearing a United badge. They waited at the airport until Phoebe's flight took off, tracked it online to Chicago, watched online as her connecting flight took off and landed in Traverse City, Michigan, where someone from the camp was scheduled to meet her plane.

But Phoebe wasn't on it. The 10-year-old spent hours alone in Chicago while United officials ignored her requests for

Writer Lynn Beisner says that her mother might have had a better life if she had aborted Beisner. This article was originally published on Role/Reboot, and was republished on Yahoo! Shine with permission. It was written by Lynn Beisner.

If there is one thing that anti-choice activists do that makes me see red, it is when they parade out their poster children: men, women, and children who were "targeted for abortion." They tell us "these people would not be alive today if abortion had been legal or if their mothers had made a different choice."

In the past couple of months, I have read two of these abortion deliverance stories that have been particularly offensive. The first story is one propagated by Rebecca Kiessling, the poster child for the no exceptions in cases of rape or incest. On her website Kiessling says that every time we say that abortion should be allowed at least in the case of rape or incest we are saying to her: "If I had my way, you'd be dead right now." She goes onto say, "I absolutely would have been aborted if it had been legal in Michigan when I was an