Roland Martin says rules in the U.S. should be loosened to encourage adoption of American children.

(CNN) — Pop star Madonna is back in the news; this time, heading back to the African nation of Malawi to adopt her second child.

You might remember all of the drama a few years ago when Madonna adopted a Malawi boy. Now she wants to adopt a girl, and a judge has said she will have to wait until Friday to see if she will get the go-ahead.

Madonna has been quoted in the Malawi newspaper Nation as saying, “Many people, especially our Malawian friends, say that David should have a Malawian brother or sister. It’s something I have been considering, but would only do if I had the support of the Malawian people and government.”

It seems that anytime we hear about celebrities like Madonna adopting, the children are from another country. I’m not at all opposed to children being adopted from Africa, China or any other country, but it does raise the question: What’s wrong with adopting American children?

Now I’m not against anyone providing a secure, loving home for a child, but it seems to me that these stories often reinforce a growing public image of adoption for many Americans: that of a rich, famous individual going to a developing country to adopt a child.

According to various adoption and governmental agencies, more than 500,000 American children are under foster care, and many of them are waiting for adoption. From coast to coast, babies to toddlers to teens are desperately looking for a home where they can be loved, nurtured and provided for.

Now, it would be easy to blast these celebrities by saying it’s the hip thing to walk around with an international child, but truth be told, we’ve got a serious adoption problem in this country.

Single mothers have a difficult time adopting a child, and several I know personally have gone overseas. And let’s not even talk about the red tape and bureaucracy!

American parents are made to jump through enormous hoops, and the process takes years, instead of months. And all too often, single people and married couples simply grow disenchanted with the process.

We can sit here and criticize Madonna all day, but enough with ripping her. Our energy should be put into a call for massive adoption reform. Don’t just bang out an e-mail or blog and get caught up in the celebrity hype.

If you think it should be easier to adopt American children, demand that your local, state and federal election officials clear the pathway to make the process easier. And let’s have more consistency. Having 50 different states set their own policy, is frankly, nonsense. With so many rules, no wonder folks throw their hands up and move on.

The goal of adoption is to put children in loving homes and not have them be the responsibility of the state. Making it harder to adopt affects you in your pocketbook because taxpayer money is spent to care for the children. So changing the laws not only helps the child, but also is fiscally prudent.

So what are you prepared to do?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland Martin.

Commentary: Why aren’t celebrities adopting U.S. kids? – CNN.com.

Jeremy and Christy Nueman used YouTube to find their adopted baby, Caleb.

Amanda, a college student seven months pregnant, scrolled past a YouTube video of a young California couple seeking adoption.

The couple, Jeremy and Christy Nueman, wanted to adopt a baby after struggling with infertility for five years. But instead of relying solely on newspaper ads or bulletin board fliers to increase their chances of connecting with a birth mother, they created a short YouTube video to show who they are.

Upon watching the video online, Amanda immediately connected with a snapshot of the Nuemans’ adorable miniature pinscher named Penny. She giggled when she saw video of Jeremy Nueman dancing happily in his kitchen, which reminded her of her own father.

She played the video over and over again.

“The video was comforting, and I could relate to them” said Amanda, who picked the Nuemans to become the adoptive parents of her baby boy out of hundreds of profiles she viewed online and through adoption agencies. Amanda chose to keep her last name anonymous for privacy reasons. “It’s so hard when you are just reading a letter to figure out what are these people like.”

With a high demand for domestic infants, adoption experts say the wait for a baby can be months or years. To gain a competitive edge, a growing number of adoption-minded couples are using Web sites like YouTube and Facebook to sell themselves as parents. Going online is cheaper, faster and reaches a wider audience than using just on print advertisements and word of mouth, they say.

Some wannabe parents are uploading YouTube videos featuring a hodgepodge of photos, home tours and interviews. Others are writing on blogs and personal Web sites to give birth mothers a glimpse of their adoption journey. To help spread the word, prospective parents also are utilizing social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook in the hope that their friends may know of a potential birth mom.

“Today’s teens and young adults looking for adoptive parents are more tech savvy than before,” says Jeff Siler, who owns ParentGallery.com, a free site created in 2007 where couples wanting to adopt can post pictures and video online. “Even before teens talk to an adoption agency, they may already be trying to Google for an answer online.”

Social media like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are also gaining traction among private adoption agencies. Bethany Christian Services, one of the nation’s largest adoption agencies, which completed more than 730 domestic infant adoptions last year, advises its couples — including the Nuemans — to create a YouTube video. Video & More on CNN:

Adoption seekers using YouTube, Facebook to find birth moms – CNN.com.

It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.

A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

“It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!” Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “That’s wrong.”

It was an essential discovery in a lesson about the reliability — or lack thereof — of information on the Internet, one of many Ms. Rosalia teaches in her role as a new kind of school librarian.

Ms. Rosalia, 54, is part of a growing cadre of 21st-century multimedia specialists who help guide students through the digital ocean of information that confronts them on a daily basis. These new librarians believe that literacy includes, but also exceeds, books. Complete  Article  Availaible at…

The Future of Reading – In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update – Series – NYTimes.com.

Cutting the Unemployment Line

Even in this economic chaos, some jobs remain recession resistant

There are three options government can pursue when the economy goes south. First, the Fed can cut interest rates, buy up assets, and extend credit, all of which the central bank has already done. Second, Congress can cut taxes on businesses and consumers in the hope they will spend more. The first effort—last year’s tax rebates—didn’t have the intended effect since consumers used much of the windfall to pay down debt or save. The substantial tax cuts that will be part of the Obama stimulus package would likely have a similarly muted effect. Businesses and consumers, facing a tough credit environment and needing to repair their balance sheets, will likely use proceeds from the tax cuts to tide themselves over. The third option is for the government to directly purchase goods and services, to substitute the demand that consumers and businesses aren’t providing.

The Washington remnant of the Republican Party—40 senators and 178 representatives—is all for Options 1 and 2, cheap money and tax cuts. But they’re having great difficulty with Option 3. They have forgotten Richard Nixon’s famous line that “we’re all Keynesians now.” To them, spending government funds to goose the economy is unacceptable, not just because of the possibility of poor execution —i.e., pork. No, many are rejecting it as a matter of principle. Even though several Republican governors are pleading for assistance in the form of federal spending, Washington Republicans are saying no.

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele laid down the party line on CNN: “Let’s get this notion out of our heads that the government create jobs. Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.” Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina succinctly summed up his opposition: “We can’t keep spending and borrowing to get us out of a recession.” Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri concedes that some government spending—such as spending on highways—can create jobs but thinks that spending on mass transit or alternative-transit infrastructure isn’t stimulative.  Read More…

Will the Stimulus Plan Create Jobs? | Newsweek Voices – Daniel Gross | Newsweek.com.

The Obama administration wants to spend up to $100 billion on efforts to help homeowners, especially those facing foreclosure. But one of the leading ideas on how to do that — rewriting home loans to make mortgages affordable to struggling borrowers — is based on a startling lack of data about what works, and early evidence suggests that many lenders aren’t going to make substantial changes without serious strong-arming.

There are various ideas being bandied about, but the goal is common: to entice mortgages servicers, whether lenders themselves or third parties acting on behalf of investors, to rewrite the terms of loans so that people behind on payments might be able to keep their homes. (Read the four steps to ending the foreclosure crisis.)

One way being discussed to do that is for the government to share in the losses if a servicer modifies a mortgage and the homeowner again defaults. Another approach is to directly help pay for the cost of the modification. The servicer might cut monthly payments to 38% of a borrower’s income with the government chipping in to reduce the payment down to 31%, a presumably more sustainable level. Either tactic could be combined with a direct payment — $1,000 is a figure often mentioned — to incentivize servicers to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how much a homeowner can truly afford and recrafting his mortgage to match.

To a homeowner who has always made mortgage payments on time, perhaps by sacrificing spending elsewhere, the whole concept may seem grossly unfair. But society’s problems are unfortunately often our own. As the foreclosure rate has skyrocketed, and loan defaults have rippled from subprime mortgages into ones made to prime and near-prime borrowers, property values in many parts of the country have been pounded. There is an unavoidable correction going on in house prices, that much is true, but the swoon has caused additional

Reviving the Housing Market: Will Loan Modifications Work? – TIME.

SAN FRANCISCO – With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.

The new software to be released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.

The feature, dubbed “Latitude,” expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.

“This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun,” said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.

It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service.

Google also is promising not to retain any information about its users’ movements. Only the last location picked up by the tracking service will be stored on Google’s computers, Lee said.

The software plots a user’s location — marked by a personal picture on Google’s map — by relying on cell phone towers, global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location. The system can follow people’s travels in the United States and 26 other countries.

Read Full Article…

Know where your kids are? Check Google maps – Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com.

Last year the champagne still flowed, but in 2009 angst will dominate the Berlin Film Festival. Cutbacks by studios, concerns about financing and a big-budget thriller about an evil bank — even the silver screen can’t ignore the world economic downturn.

Every movie gets the villains it deserves. Bandits attacking Indians? It’s a western. Hit men shooting police? A crime story. And when psychopaths try to achieve world domination, it’s either a terrorist drama or a film about Adolf Hitler. Those are the usual suspects.

Since the financial crisis, though, a range of unexpected villains has started parading across the screen. Werner Schulz, a politician from Germany’s Green Party, summed up the current mood a few days ago: “Now people are more afraid of their financial advisors than of al-Qaida.”

One German director seems to have anticipated this development. Tom Tykwer, known for his bank robbery fable “Run Lola Run,” will premiere his new thriller “The International” on Thursday, when it opens the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale. This time the bank itself is the villain.

The bank in the movie, in fact, is a criminal organization that commissions murder and homicide — a “bad bank” worse than anything from the current nightmares of the world’s finance ministers. The hero in “The International” is not a crusading protector of the public interest but British star Clive Owen (“Inside Man”).

The financial crisis will set the tone at this year’s Berlinale, the most important international film festival after Cannes. It will be the main topic of conversation at the parties and receptions, the festival’s speeches, press conferences and in the haggling over film rights and new productions.

Complete Article…

Worry Lines Through the Botox: Berlinale Reflects Leaner Times for Movie Business – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

Skype 4.0 (download) became available for free on Tuesday to Windows users. The free desktop VoIP communicator is a worthy final version that brings some key enhancements with video and audio bandwidth, though it leaves behind some of the extra adornments of version 3.8, the last stable build.

Those who have been following the triple release of betas since the summer won’t see more than a few changes. If 4.0 is new to you, however, the developments are more notable.

Skype concentrates on video size, quality, and performance in this version. From version 3.8 to version 4.0, every design change has been made to draw video and IM to the forefront, and for the most part it works. The video window has expanded and calls are easier to start. The classic two-pane interface has consolidated into one, though you can still split them apart if you prefer.

Skype’s beautifully staged marketing shot shows Skype 4.0′s new videotopia.

(Credit: Skype)

As the culmination of the beta series, Skype 4.0 gets a pumped-up video and a completely new audio engine. Compared with other codecs out there, the new audio engine, named Silk, is touted to give Skype superwide-band audio (which operates like broadband), but uses half the bandwidth. Fewer bandwidth demands gives Skypers with dial-up connections (like a lot of people in India and Brazil) a bigger boost, keeping calls from being dropped or mangled beyond recognition.

I’ll attest to the great call quality during my interview with Skype’s London-based product manager. It was clear and the vocal timbre sounded true. Keep in mind that I dialed in from a newish, memory-loaded Asus computer with full broadband support and a set of top-tier headphones. Quality will still depend on your Internet connection and hardware configuration. Using headphones that support ultra-wideband audio will help.

The video stream was similarly good. Though far from the perfection of TV, I noticed fewer jumps and blips and sound syncing that was very close to real-time. Problems that have beset Skype’s video calls in the past–a frozen or choppy image and packetized audio–were largely absent during test calls. According to Skype, that’s thanks to a new back-end addition that sticks a finger in the air of network conditions. As available bandwidth drops, the bandwidth manager tries to salvage audio first.

What my demo call looked like on a Vista set-up.

In choppy conditions, it helps steady the video, too, by lowering the rate of frames per second and by compressing images more heavily. Your friend on the other end may become blocky and the image delayed, but faces should also break up less than in previous versions.

Other new features include abuse reporting if you receive an invite from an unauthorized Skyper, and a light stub installer that pulls down the rest of the application.

Skype, it seems, has also been pulled into a toolbar partnership. Now when you install it, you’ll see that an optional toolbar that comes bundled with Skype 4.0. The free Browser Highlighter includes the ‘Compare on eBay’ tool for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Considering that eBay owns Skype, it’s not a surprising addition, but one I’ll nonetheless pass on every time.

What’s missing

There are two skins in version 4.0, the default light gray and blue combo called Skype ‘Chrome,’ and the classic hue. Skype hinted at more skin support in later versions coming out this year. There aren’t plans at the moment to support third-party skins, but customization, I’ve been assured, will get more attention.

Along these lines are absent customizations that had not been making beta testers happy. If you’ve been holding your breath for greater IM treatment in this release, or birthday reminders, you might breathe again until the next launch.

Those of you shouting about the cessation of public chats will be glad to know that Skype 4.0 for Windows will support those you already have, but it will keep you from adding new ones. Skype representatives told us they’re still playing around with ideas of how to become more Web-oriented. It could as easily look like a reshaped version of chats as it could go in a different direction.

That brings us to Skypecasts, another source of some users’ lamentations. Skypecasts was pulled last September because it just couldn’t grab the hoped-for attention. A similar(-ish) feature will probably be rolled into whatever public chats becomes in future releases.

For now, Skype has retreated to its bread-and-butter position of providing good, clean voice, video, and text chatting. If worldwide Windows users notice consistently improved audio and video quality, that’s not a bad place to be.

dwonload skype.

CAMDEN — Jeffrey Jones spent the first 10 years of his life in Camden, raised by his mother, a tutor, and his father, who held several jobs at a time to make ends meet.

Even as a boy, Jones said he was keenly aware of the poverty that ravaged the city. And when his family moved to Mickleton several years ago, Jones immediately realized there was a huge disparity in the opportunities available to Camden’s children and those in his new school.

He particularly noticed what he called the technological shortcomings of the city’s schools, and that thought stayed with Jones until he enrolled at Rutgers-Camden.

In September, Jones, 20, started a student group that initially focused on mentoring sick children in Cooper University Hospital’s pediatric ward. Its focus quickly shifted to education.

In December, Miracles became Miracles Global Inc., a nonprofit organization that’s independent of the university. Jones is the president of the organization, which has grown to include 25 members and a group on the social networking Web site Facebook.

The group’s aim is to collect money or computers that will be given to Camden schools and eventually, Jones hopes, to other ailing districts in the state and throughout the country, Jones said.

“We’re living in a globalized economy, a globalized world, and inner-city kids are being disconnected,” he said. “They’re at such an informational disadvantage.”

“We don’t need top-of-the-line equipment,” he said. “We pretty much just need to be able to word process and access the Internet. Those are the skills that we’re trying to focus on.”

Jones wants Miracles Global to reach students who otherwise would have limited to no access to computers and other technology.

“Hopefully we can bring these technologies into the classroom and eliminate some of the pressure these kids face,” he said. “They’re at a disadvantage and just can’t compete with other students in the region.”

“We’re all human beings and our environment shapes a lot of what we become,” Jones said. “I lived in Camden for 10 years, but there are a lot of others who lived in the city who didn’t turn out as well as I did.”

“That’s not because they’re any less of a man or a woman,” he added. “If they had been given access to the same tools, they could’ve been as great as anyone.”

FOLLOW on Twitter @MiraclesGlobal

Computers sought for city’s kids | CourierPostOnline.com | Courier-Post.