Adoptions

My name is Haley. I was adopted in 1995. I now live in America. I enjoy singing and playing the violin and hanging out with my friends. I have a good life, but I would like to find my biological family. Just minutes after Jeannie Butler and her adopted daughter, Haley, tacked a Chinese-language poster with this message to a wall in the Yangtze River village where she had been abandoned, a woman emerged from a restaurant next door and did a double-take. The woman stared hard at Haley, 14, then at the baby photo on the poster.

An American woman who set off an international furor when she sent a Russian child whom she had adopted back to Moscow, has been ordered to pay $1,000 a month in child support and $150,000 in various fees.

When Karen Adams of West Covina saw the snapshot of the two black-haired babies with pink bows, she said she felt a flower blossom in her heart. They were her granddaughters, but she had never seen them because they had been given away to adoptive parents half a continent away. No matter how well the couple cares for them, Adams, a descendant of Native Americans from a Northern California Pomo tribe, said the twins, now 2, don't belong with outsiders.

Joining a growing number of municipalities, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday adopted a "responsible banking" ordinance that will require banks doing business with the city to disclose detailed data on loans and foreclosure activity by community. Much of the information is already reported under federal law but can be hard to find in voluminous federal banking reports, said Miguel Santana, city administrative officer. The new law would bring the information together on a city website that the public could search by census tract, he said.

Lt. Clarence (Buzz) Harvey at first did not know what to make of the blonde 42-year-old woman who appeared at the front desk of this town's solitary police station on the morning of Sept. 18, 1986. Those in the station familiar with the downtown strip joints in nearby St. Paul might have recognized Jerry Ann Sherwood from her earlier tenure at Alary's Club Bar. Her features were still attractive, although the years had added a certain hardness and fleshiness. She had a story to tell.

It has been 4 1/2 years since Bernice Abeyta put her infant son, Christopher, to bed in his crib, 4 1/2 years since she last saw him. That was July 13, 1986, around midnight. Christopher slept with his parents in the master bedroom of their home in Colorado Springs, Colo. Four other children slept peacefully elsewhere in the house. No one heard anything unusual. But when Bernice Abeyta got up at 6 the next morning, 7-month-old Christopher was gone.

The call to police and emergency services Nov. 2 reported a child having difficulty breathing. But when officers and technicians arrived at the Greenwich Village apartment, in a building where Mark Twain once lived, they found an infant boy tethered to a chair, covered with dirt and soaking in his own urine. Blood was spattered on the walls and on the single mattress the family apparently shared. On the kitchen floor lay a naked 6-year-old girl.

After years of struggling to have a child, Sylvia thought her heartache finally was over. The Beverly Hills adoption attorney retained by the 41-year-old West Los Angeles resident and her husband called with good news: An Artesia couple, the woman eight months pregnant, was willing to have Sylvia and her husband adopt their child. Sylvia and her husband met with the couple, drew up papers, and began paying them $1,250 a month for medical expenses and rent.

When television producer Sibyl Gardner adopted a baby girl in China in 2003, the official story was that the infant had been abandoned on the steps of the salt works in the city of Guangchang, where a worker found the day-old child and took her to a social welfare institution. But after reading with "utter horror" the latest revelations of child trafficking in China in the Los Angeles Times, Gardner found herself contemplating a trip to back to Jiangxi province to investigate how Zoë, now 7, came up for adoption.

Farrah Leolo, a 9-year-old with a charming smile, was dressed for an important journey. Her hair was braided and she wore a crisp white blouse and pink slacks. In her pocket, she had cookies and passport-sized photos. A few minutes after Farrah left the Horizon of Hope child-care center with French Embassy officials this week, her adoptive mother called the center's owner, Kathelen Douyon, from Paris. "She looked so beautiful," Douyon told the mother. Then, choking back tears, she silently handed the phone to an aide and put her face in her hands.

"What's the difference between Jewish and Chinese mah jong?" the protagonist of Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" asks her mother about the quintessential Chinese game. Her mother replies, "Entirely different kind of playing.... Jewish mah jong, they watch only for their own tile, play only with their eyes. " "Project Mah Jongg," a colorful exhibition opening Thursday (through Sept. 2) at the Skirball Cultural Center, tells the Jewish side of the story. With vintage photographs, souvenirs, playing guides and other ephemera, and of course examples of the tiles themselves, the exhibition traces how the game was enthusiastically adopted and integrated into the social life of Jewish women in the 20th century.

A group of downtown residents and their dogs were romping on a small patch of grass next to the glass edifice that headquarters the Los Angeles Police Department when the playful mood was broken. "Hey, hey, look out!" someone shouted. A dog off its leash ran into the street, and was causing drivers to swerve. A similar incident had occurred just hours before, one park visitor said, when another dog escaped its owner and ran into the street, only to be saved by a homeless person.

In the Louisiana parish that was home to generations of my family, people lived hard lives as field hands or sharecroppers, laboring from "can see in the morning" to "can't see at night. " They hoed and picked cotton, corn, peas and other crops; they understood the planting cycle; they ate locally grown fruits and vegetables without ever visiting a supermarket. Long before the terms "eco-friendly" and "environmentalism" came into vogue, generations of Americans embraced the principles of recycle, reuse, reduce without ever naming them.

Analyzing DNA from four ancient skeletons and comparing it with thousands of genetic samples from living humans, a group of Scandinavian scientists reported that agriculture initially spread through Europe because farmers expanded their territory northward, not because the more primitive foragers already living there adopted it on their own. The genetic profiles of three Neolithic hunter-gatherers and one farmer who lived in the same region of...

Actress Katherine Heigl now has a new life as she knows it. The "New Year's Eve" star and crooner husband Josh Kelley have adopted a second daughter. " Yes they have adopted a baby," a rep for Heigl confirmed to several outlets. "No further details [are available] at this time.”   Heigl and Kelley are mom and dad to adorable 3-year-old girl Naleigh, and considering what Katherine told us last year, the family will be thrilled for the company. "I don't actually have a ton of friends with kids, it's really weird.

Susan Kang Schroeder ticked off the facts of the case: A man bought a 5-year-old girl from Vietnam, used her as a sex slave for more than a decade and forced her to invite over friends whom he molested during sleepovers. "She was made to do every possible sex act," Schroeder said with a bluntness she honed as a prosecutor. But this wasn't a jury. It was the seven members of the Huntington Beach City Council. And if the aim of the Orange County district attorney's chief of staff was to grab their attention with the story of one of the county's most notorious pedophiles, it worked.

The California Supreme Court sided with grandparents and others who want to adopt children over their parents' objections in a pair of rulings that legal experts said would make it easier for guardians to prevail in adoption cases.

Russia has frozen all adoptions to the United States, the Foreign Ministry announced Thursday as national outrage simmered over a towheaded 7-year-old boy sent alone on a plane back to Moscow by his adoptive mother. A U.S. delegation is due in Moscow within days to discuss the crisis. Russia is pressing the United States to sign an agreement that would more carefully screen would-be parents and monitor the families after their return to the United States, Foreign Ministry officials have said.

Lee Post signed up for high-speed Internet service from AT&T in 2009 for $10 a month. He knew this was an introductory rate and that, come 2010, the monthly cost would rise to $14.95. What Post didn't know was that this rate wasn't very permanent either. When 2011 rolled around, his Internet bill jumped 33% to $19.95. Now we're in 2012, and what's happened? Post, 71, of Torrance, said his monthly Internet bill has climbed 25% more to $25. All in all, that means AT&T has jacked up his Internet service rate 150% in just three years.

ATLANTA — Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed a bill Monday imposing new restrictions on the state's sole abortion clinic that could force it to close its doors. The law is one of several recent state measures championed by antiabortion activists and passed largely by Republican allies. Last week, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law that banned most abortions after 20 weeks. In March, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell signed a bill requiring women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion.