Police: Couple nurtured virtual child while real baby starved

From Andrew Salmon for CNN

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — Police have arrested a South Korean couple whose toddler starved to death while they were raising a virtual child online, authorities said.

The couple fed their 3-month-old daughter once a day between marathon stretches in a local Internet cafe, where they were raising a virtual child in the fantasy role-playing game Prius Online, police told local reporters Friday.

Full (awful) story here

as much as it might seem like a good idea to rush into potty training, especially if you have a kid who is showing advanced abilities, studies show that you should wait.  but not too long…

A new study suggests 27 to 32 months is the ideal window for moving your child out of diapers. Children who were toilet trained after 32 months were more likely to have urge incontinence — daytime wetting and bed-wetting — between ages 4 and 12.

I’ve heard about a method that involves three days and NO diapers, probably some messy pants and some unpleasant laundry, but has success.  Well, I know of two cases that worked…we will cover that soon on PoppaBlog.

More on the study mentioned above, here.

Full Story Here

I’m not one to judge, OK OK I am…but seriously?  The girl is 18, thinks she is a wolf…has her dead dog’s skull in a jar…and her own bloody animal fridge.  I have a daughter…I need to know how to not end up with a wolf girl.

Sarah Rodriguez, also known as Wolfie Blackheart

[following content from mysanantonio.com] Wolfie Blackheart is not an ordinary 18-year-old.

She believes she is a wolf — technically, a werewolf — and so she wears a tail. She also wears a harness in case someone special wants to drag her around.

And last week, she used a pocketknife in her kitchen to decapitate a dog — already dead, according to Wolfie — that had been missing since Jan. 5.

“I severed the head, boiled the head,” Wolfie said. “People make the mistake of hacking the spine, which will fracture the skull.”

She added, “You also have to put (the head) outside for the brains to leak out.”

Before the teenager carted the cranium to the woods, someone held it up and snapped a photograph of it inside her Northwest Side house — a shot that ended up on the Internet.

Within days, the photo had spurred an aggressive animal cruelty investigation by Animal Care Services and the San Antonio Police Department.

It also inspired at least one so-called troll — a savvy, anonymous Internet user — to hack into Wolfie’s personal accounts, engage in amateur sleuthing and issue threats to those deemed responsible for the dog’s fate.

Bearing the brunt of these attacks, Wolfie — born Sarah Rodriguez — says she’s guilty of nothing more than an abiding love for taxidermy.

“I would never kill a canine,” she said. “I am a canine.”

Lisa Rodriguez, Wolfie’s mom, said she supports her daughter’s career goal.

“I say, ‘Don’t sever heads in front of me,’ ” she said. “She usually does it in the woods.”

Wolfie cares lovingly for two huskies in the backyard.

Her room is a cluttered den plastered with posters of anime characters and howling wolves. On a high shelf, she collects heads, including the cleaned skulls of a coyote, ram and wild boar.

When a car ran over Pixie — her “best friend” — Wolfie cut off the chihuahua’s tiny head, cleaned it and placed it in a jar.

“I get requests on cats and stuff,” she said.

Wolfie also has collected more than a dozen swords, including a “two-handled war sword” made of carbon steel and a katana blade from Japan.

She said investigators knocked on her door Friday with a search warrant.

“When they saw her room, they had to call every single cop to her room,” said her mother, who lives in the home. “The spots on the wall, they thought it was blood. It’s catsup. The kids had a fight. They’re teenagers.”

She added, “Wolfie does have a bloody refrigerator, but they’re all dead animals.”
Crime scene investigators swabbed the walls. Authorities confiscated the dog’s head. No one could find the body. [continues]

grrrr, k thx bye, gonna go howl at the moon now.

Good old Mickey Mouse and his team of lawyers is making it right. Yes, if you have some Baby Einstein DVDs laying around, you are entitled to a $15.99 refund for up to 4 DVDs.

The New York Times said:

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.

“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.

Baby Einstein, founded in 1997, was one of the earliest players in what became a huge electronic media market for babies and toddlers. Acquired by Disney in 2001, the company expanded to a full line of books, toys, flashcards and apparel, along with DVDs including “Baby Mozart,” “Baby Shakespeare” and “Baby Galileo.”

The videos — simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.

Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2.

Looking for something that isn’t at all educational but for some reason will make a 5 month old kid crack up? I suggest Pororo.

In fact, the only thing this episode will teach your kid is how to be self conscious about her body.

But that’s another post…

The Associated Press reports a white Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

The justice says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

” ‘I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,’ Keith Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. ‘I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.’ “

Full Story Here

Well, if he lets black people use his bathroom, how can he be a racist?

WASHINGTON—Plum Organics of Emeryville, Calif., is recalling some of its apple and carrot portable pouch baby food because of concerns over possible botulism contamination.

The product was sold individually throughout the country at Toys-R-Us and Babies-R-Us stores. The recalled product is sold in 4.22-ounce pouches, with a “best by” date of May 21, 2010, and UPC 890180001221.

FULL STORY

It’s inevitable, your kid will be online at some point. Kids love whatever is trendy and fun, and we all know what that means, Starcraft, IRC, Salon.com and Friendster. In all seriousness though, as a parent, it is your duty to protect your child at all times. Which means at ALL times. Be smart, install some sort of invasive monitoring program if they have their own computer, or limit online time to a location where you can stop by a sneek a peek at what their doing. If they’re a little older, then have the “That dude who says he is 15 and thinks that you are cute is probably a 45 year old man living in his grandmas basement, waiting for you to give him your home address so that he can bring you weed, cheap beer and try to touch you in places that your bathing suit covers” talk.

Here’s the Telegraph’s take on the topic: Is social networking bad for our children?

And yes, that is MC Hammer in the picture (must be legit, in fact, perhaps it is too legit to quit)

And just in case you didn’t get the coming over with weed and beer reference…you need to brush up on pop-culture and do a search on youtube for Chris Hansen:

Keep up on all of the nasty cases of the media’s favorite illnesses from the comfort of your own germ free bunker. Now when your kids ask why they can’t go out and play, you can show them all of the H1N1 cases within 50 miles of the playground. Lock them in folks, nothing worse than a kid with a well developed immune system!

In all seriousness though, if H1N1 (swine flu) or some other nasty little bug gets out of hand, this is a good resource to keep a tab on where it’s causing the most damage.

About HealthMap

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Story HERE

The baby, who is still unnamed and is 24.4 inches (62 centimetres) long, was born by Caesarean section on Monday at a public hospital in North Sumatra province, a gynaecologist who took part in the operation told AFP.

“This heavy baby made the surgery really tough, especially the process of taking him out of his mum’s womb. His legs were so big,” Binsar Sitanggang said.

It’s been a rough week. A few days ago, at UCLA’s Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, 6-year-old Jani toppled a food cart and was confined to her room. She slammed her head against the floor, opening a bloody cut that sent her into hysterics. Later, she kicked the hospital therapy dog.

Jani normally likes animals. But most of her animal friends — cats, rats, dogs and birds — are phantoms that only she can see. January Schofield has schizophrenia. Potent psychiatric drugs — in doses that would stagger most adults — seem to skip off her. She is among the rarest of the rare: a child seemingly born mentally ill.

She suffers from delusions, hallucinations and paroxysms of rage so severe that not even her parents feel safe. She’s threatened to climb into an oven. She’s kicked and tried to bite her little brother. “I’m Jani, and I have a cat named Emily 54,” she says, by way of introduction. “And I’m Saturn-the-Rat’s baby sitter.”

Full story HERE