Reunions

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.

There are things that Slash just doesn't want to talk about. And the timing was definitely not right a few weeks ago as the guitarist was preparing for a trip to Cleveland for his induction with Guns N' Roses into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "I don't even want to talk about that. I don't want to touch it," Slash said in April, his usual friendly demeanor turning cool at the mere mention of GNR. It was during a week of drama and uncertainty about the ceremony, which had peaked days earlier with the arrival of a confrontational open letter to the Hall of Fame from singer Axl Rose.

'It was just a business your people and our people had to do.' More than 40 years ago, in flying machines sporting swastikas and 20-millimeter cannons, they ranged over Europe, five fighter pilots who between them shot down 821 Allied airplanes. Over London, in frozen Russia and above the hedgerows of France, they won duels as their nation lost a war. Now they are relics, aging men holding tight to their medals and to their memories of glorious missions and close calls.

When the Hives last played the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, the appearance could have been considered a victory lap for the band. It was 2003, and the practitioners of lean, fashionable rock 'n' roll had a year earlier seen their air-guitar-ready scolder "Hate to Say I Told You So" crack the top-100 on the U.S. pop charts. The success of the song ultimately led the band to a multi-album global deal with Universal Music U.K. said to be worth seven figures. Rock 'n' roll, it seemed, had been very, very good to the Hives.

One hundred elderly North Koreans arrived in Seoul today at the start of reunions for families separated by the Korean War. A similar delegation from South Korea prepared to fly to Pyongyang, the North's capital. The three-day reunions come despite setbacks in bilateral talks over the North's demands for electricity from the South and differences over where to set up a permanent meeting place for future reunions.

Larry (Bear) D. Hughes watched his friend Ralph Harter go down in a hail of enemy gunfire while fighting in the jungles of Vietnam 24 years ago. "He got shot up pretty bad," Hughes said. "He was a mess when I carried him to the helicopter that took him to Japan for medical treatment, and I never heard from him again. I didn't know if he lived or died." But in 1991, at the third annual Vietnam Veterans Reunion, Hughes saw Harter, who had been living in Canton, Ohio.

It was like a national family reunion. There were tears, smiles and scenes of unrestrained joy, mixed with disbelief that what was happening was really happening. After three decades as the industrialized world's most penned-in people, East Germans suddenly learned that they were free to come and go as they pleased. And they did.

Some mothers came to swap stories about their pregnancies and to offer advice to other expectant women. Others came to hear those tips and to enjoy the support of their experienced cohorts. But all of the women who attended the third annual Fertility Reunion had at least one thing in common: Their children were conceived through in-vitro fertilization or other artificial methods. Friday was a day for them to celebrate their motherhood.

Like old chums, they shook hands and slapped backs. They broke bread and they swapped stories. They smiled in the face of a relentless press corps that at one point nearly pushed them against a wall to get photos. But mostly, these members of one of history's most exclusive fraternities took time during a ceremony attended by more than 40,000 fans and dignitaries to laud one of their own--Richard M.

John Streltzoff says they helped him put his children through college. Bernard Hernandez believes they saved his career as an engineer. But Kimberly Arguelles has a story to top them all. Without carpools, she says, she might never have been reunited with the sister she hadn't seen since they were young girls. "I still can't believe it," says Arguelles, 32. To the compendium of war stories and quirky tales that make up the urban lore of our lives, we add Tales From the Fast Lane.

"The Hunger Games"surpassed the $300-million milestone at the box office over the weekend, making the film more popular with American moviegoers than any of the "Twilight" installments. For the third consecutive weekend, the adaptation of Suzanne Collins' novel claimed the No. 1 position at the multiplex, grossing an additional $33.5 million this weekend, according to an estimate from distributor Lionsgate. The movie has collected $302.8 million in the U.S. and Canada alone; the highest domestic gross for a "Twilight" film was November's "Breaking Dawn - Part 1," which sold $300.5-million worth of tickets by the end of its run. Meanwhile, audiences weren't as nostalgic for the 1990s as Hollywood had hoped.

The '90s may be back at the multiplex this weekend, but that decade's comeback could be thwarted by a more of-the-moment movie event:"The Hunger Games. " For the third consecutive weekend, the blockbuster based on Suzanne Collins' popular novel is expected to top the box office. The film starring Jennifer Lawrence has already raked in more than $260 million domestically and could collect an additional $30 million this weekend, according to those who have seen pre-release audience surveys.

'American Reunion' MPAA rating: R for crude and sexual content throughout, nudity, language, brief drug use and teen drinking Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes Playing: In general release

Sweeping aside the film's weirdest unasked question — who goes to their 13th high school reunion? — the characters created by Adam Herz for the 1999 hit "American Pie" return for a rather tired sequel called "American Reunion," in which poor, desperate Jim Levenstein's genitals once again get their ears boxed (metaphorically speaking), and Stifler's way with nubile 17-year-olds doesn't seem quite as obnoxiously sprightly as it once did, given that Stifler is now supposed to be in his early 30s and the actor, Seann William Scott, is 35. The movie acknowledges this queasy disconnect, though acknowledging it doesn't make it much funnier.

UNDERRATED Anders Parker : The singer-songwriter's mid-'00s solo albums "Tell It to the Dust" and "The Wounded Astronaut" were hidden gems with a mix of dusty Americana and jagged, Crazy Horse guitars. Hopefully, Parker's work on "New Multitudes," a diverse and dusty new collection of unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics with Son Volt's Jay Farrar, Centro-Matic's Will Johnson and My Morning Jacket's Jim James, will bring him closer to the surface. 'Travels to the Edge With Art Wolfe' : In an age where anyone with a phone can live their own Diane Arbus fantasies, there's still no substitute for a professional.

Axl Rose is wearing a white cotton bathrobe and white tube socks, relaxing on a couch backstage Friday night after a three-hour concert at Seattle's Key Arena, where he'd snaked his way through 34 songs with a version of the band he co-founded a quarter-century ago, Guns N' Roses. It's 3 a.m., and the singer, the sole remaining original member, has shed the bad-ass sunglasses and flat-brimmed Stetson-style hat he wore onstage, pulled off the snakeskin boots and changed out of his faded bell bottoms.

The last time Robin Martin was in Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Medical Center, he was a rosy-cheeked baby who had problems maintaining his temperature. Robin's mother, Karen, said her son was losing weight in utero and his birth may have been high-risk because of her rising blood pressure. Doctors had to induce labor and Robin was watched closely for nearly two weeks before he was allowed to go home. That was 14 years ago.

The man in the black suit and wide-brimmed hat now walking hesitantly up the ramp from customs looks Romanian. Is he my father? My heart pounding, I press through the throng of well-wishers gathered to greet arrivals from the Pan Am flight. ' 'Bine ai venit!' I hear a voice behind me and another woman runs up and kisses the man on both cheeks. My mistake terrifies me. What if I don't recognize him?

For the second consecutive day, visitors hoping to glimpse the reopened, renovated spaces in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris were greeted with closed doors Friday due to a workers' strike. The unveiling of the two-year, $27-million renovation was supposed to take place on Thursday, but some 34 employees went on strike against an expected cut in jobs that they said was a slap in the face in light of ambitious, costly additions to the museum that they believe require an increase of personnel.

Jane's Addiction's new album, "The Great Escape Artist," was still a work in progress last May when the band appeared on an outdoor stage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Jane's was the musical entertainment at an exhibition opening for director Tim Burton's work as an artist and filmmaker, and singer Perry Farrell was dressed for the part, wearing the Mad Hatter's Victorian top hat and coat from Burton's reimagined "Alice in Wonderland....