Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
China Daily is reporting that the Chinese police are starting to put together a national DNA database to help combat child trafficking and help lost children; 107,000 kids and 35,000 from anxious parents. The database is composed of blood samples taken by the police from missing children’s parents, children suspected of having been abducted or [...]
Going off to the Dayton trip tomorrow (Monday) morning, coming back by dinnertime Thursday. Apparently, there’s going to be a ton of snow (6-8 inches) hit Dayton tomorrow, and I’m really not thrilled about having to do a long drive through snow…will check this carefully in the morning. Expect some reports on the road from [...]
This one is a weird amalgam of the Dayton Daily News article and the Newsweek one. For one thing, it thinks that we used to live in Dayton; the last time I lived in Dayton was 1977, thirty years ago, long before I married Susan. It also notes a 2009 picture of the twins as [...]
Above is a weird line from another Chinese article on the twins that appeared in the Hong Kong news for Yahoo; from the “(Ming Daily) on December 22, 2009 on Tuesday 05:10″ The article (English translation via Babelfish translation) follows after the cut. It seems to be a boil-down of the Newsweek article.
…from the Dayton Daily News (my hometown paper) about the twins. This was a surprise, really, and will beyond any doubt be the end of the stories. Part of it is that it’s all been said – there’s not a lot more to add.
Dayton Daily News article; the reporter’s adopted child from China was first raised by a foster family in China, who the child hadn’t forgotten -and who hadn’t forgotten her. Great story about how the foster family and the adoptive family got in contact… Considering the whole thing with the twins and sisterfar, this hits home [...]
http://bit.ly/6bT2Os (from the Newseum, possibly not good after tonight – front page of today’s Daily Herald) IL_DH (pdf of the page – big center layout of photos of the girls)
The local suburban daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, is reprinting the Newsweek story on the twins with different photos: http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=342760
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1 The Power of Two: http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098 Photo gallery of the kids, etc. The Intro picture is particularly stunning. This has been in the works since spring. Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots. The interviews mostly were around [...]
Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town. Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
ORPHAN: My readers quietly passed along some information on this still-yet-to-open movie that I trashed earlier…and a little more information on a personal note. Susan talked to Mere, and she got the impression from Meredith that the sheer scariness of the poster got to Mere more than anything else. Arthur passed along this article from [...]
Still tired and shaky; didn’t sleep well last night – early on because my lower leg is still loaded with fluid and was painful and crampy, and that was majorly distracting, and then got up at 4ish because Mere was in bed with us, and had wormed her way towards me in sleep so that [...]
This weekend, Meredith, her cousin Kay and I got out on a rare outing to a movie, and saw STAR TREK on the big screen; the kids were ‘I-dunno-about-this’ until they got sucked into the story, and they want MORE. I thought for a re-boot of the original series, it was actually darn decent. [...]
I absolutely refuse to watch the train wreck of Jon and Kate Plus Eight – haven’t for a while, and I did catch about 10 minutes of the start-of-season one before I got nauseated. I’m hearing stories about their ratings falling apart, and I’m just as glad. First off, while some find the whole thing [...]