Lost And Found
Friday feel-good alert! In 1991, 6-year old
Lopez Lomong was snatched from his family and taken by Sudanese rebels to be one of the numerous child soldiers who came to be known as the "
Lost Boys of the Sudan." Lopez was eventually able to escape and was ultimately discovered in a work camp by Catholic Charities, who placed him with an American family in upstate New York, where he quickly became a cross-country and track star. "In my country, soccer players are athletes," he said. "But runners? Everybody runs. You want to go to a neighbor's house, you run. You want to go to school, you run." Now, Lopez is competing in the
Beijing Olympics. More remarkable still, he's been reunited with his birth family, who had long assumed their son was dead. (In the movie version, he'll obviously win Gold.) [
The Guardian]
babies having babies
Here we are, worried about the
sexualization of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, when 31 out of 53 girls from the ages of 14-17 from the Yearning For Zion
ranch are pregnant or already have children. Although the polygamist
Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints have been claiming that they do not marry off 13 and 14 year old girls to older men, the number of very young yet pregnant girls seems to refute these claims. What's more, there are 53 girls ages 14-17 who were taken from the ranch, while only 17 boys in that age group were living with the sect. (The gender divisions in children under 14 were about 50/50.) This gives credence to the tales of
"lost boys" of the FDLS: adolescent males who were exiled from the sect to keep the gender imbalance favorable for polygamous unions.
More »
big love
As of this morning, Texan authorities have taken custody of 401 children from the polygamist sect
The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). As previously reported, Texas
child protective services was acting on a tip from a 16-year-old girl
inside the compound who said that she was forced to marry 50-year-old convicted sex offender Dale Barlow at the age of 15 and bear his child. Among the 401 children and 133 women who have been taken from the 1,900 acre FLDS compound outside
Eldorado, Texas, police have still been unable to find the teen informant, as many of the women and children share the same last names or have multiple given names. Court proceedings to determine whether to remove the children permanently began yesterday, and officials are trying to determine whether to send every child from the compound into a foster home.
More »
Jezebel
