by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• There’s been a possible break in the Chen Guangcheng case as Chinese authorities claim they will allow Chen to apply to leave the country:
  

  Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng has been offered a fellowship at a university in the U.S. and can be accompanied by his wife and two children, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement Friday.

  “The Chinese Government has indicated that it will accept Mr. Chen’s applications for appropriate travel documents,” Nuland said in the statement. “The United States government expects that the Chinese government will expeditiously process his applications for these documents and make accommodations for his current medical condition. The United States government would then give visa requests for him and his immediate family priority attention.”

• Supermodel Linda Evangelista claims the billionaire father of her 5-year-old child asked her to have an abortion when she was pregnant. Evangelista is currently in court with French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault [both pictured left] looking for child support:
  

  Pinault, 49, who is currently married to actress Salma Hayek, denied that charge but testified he told Evangelista that “if she were to have a child (they) might not have a relationship.”

  With that a four-month relationship, in which he said the couple only actually saw each other seven days, came to an end.

• The newest plastic surgery fad: Stem cell makeovers:
  

  It is a medical claim that sounds like science fiction. Walk into a plastic surgeon’s office for a face-lift and walk out roughly four hours later with a whole-body makeover that required no incision and leaves you with no scars….

  … [A] skin-care specialist from Ohio… underwent a stem-cell makeover in which fat was removed from her waist via liposuction. The fat was then spun in the lab to concentrate its stem cells and, hours later, injected into [her] face and breasts.

  Price tag? 10-15K for the 4 hour procedure.

[Image via beautyandthedirt.com]

by LauraLoo

Last month Marilu Henner gave her first interview on VegTV to promote her latest book, Total Memory Makeover.

Also, earlier this week Marilu visited 89WLS Chicago to do a radio interview with coanchors Bruce Wolf and Dan Proft.

Marilu looks great… and I sure would love to increase my memory! 

Email LauraLoo with your Lunch Break suggestions.

Comedienne Sarah Silverman took some heat after tweeting an unfunny “aborsh” joke along with before-and-after photos a couple weeks ago, garnering the attention of Drudge and the worldwide media.

On April 17 Silverman tried to pull the joke back, although as Jivin J pointed out, Politico’s characterization of this as an “apology” was exceedingly generous…

And even that slight surrender apparently grated on Silverman so much she had to take another stab at abortion humor while simultaneously reassuring her peers she was still staunchly pro-abortion, tweeting 11 minutes later…

But it is not like Silverman to pull back. According to Reuters:

In 2001, Silverman joked on NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” that she got out of jury duty by writing “I love chinks” on a selection form.

The joke, again, was the shock value, and her supposed racial cluelessness. The Media Action Network for Asian-Americans demanded an apology, which she refused to give, and suggested the group wasn’t sincerely offended but was rather using the incident to raise its profile.

But in this case it was apparently pragmatism that forced Silverman to check herself. Fame and money preclude abortion jokes, which just aren’t funny to most Americans – or television execs watching their own bottom line. And when even a Tinseltown rag and its followers raise their eyebrows, you know you’ve gone too far…

Back to Reuters:

There’s a long tradition of edgy comedians sanding down their edges as they try to make themselves generically likable enough to score network sitcoms.

Sarah Silverman is not part of that tradition.

With NBC soon to decide whether to give her a show in the fall, the “Sarah Silverman Program” star made an abortion joke that struck some as too flippant….

Drudge linked to the story with the headline, “Sarah Silverman tweets ‘before-and-after abortion’ photos, failing to note that, in fact, no abortion had occurred.

But try explaining that to anyone who sees even the possibility of a Silverman show on NBC as more evidence that a monolithic media has a left-wing, anti-family agenda.

The pilot would seem to have a strong chance of becoming a series when NBC makes its decision this spring about which of its pilots will become series. The currently titled “Susan 313” is produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, among others, and Jeff Goldblum has reportedly signed on to guest star. NBC and Silverman’s representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.

NBC must know what it’s getting into with Silverman. Picking up the show will be a signal that the network is willing to deal with at least the possibility that she’ll say or do something controversial, on or off the air.

Silverman is into gross-out humor, as a scan of her her tweets quickly shows.  NBC obviously knows what it’s getting into if it contracts with Silverman. So apparently anus, rectum, porn, and male anatomy jokes are okay, but abortion jokes go a step too far.  Interesting. One topic Silverman is going to have to censor herself on if she wants to make the big jump from cable to network television is abortion.

[HT: Chicken Man]

It’s taken months, but Kim has finally made moves to rebuild her life her own way — which means exploring her options for adopting as a single parent without delay.

She would like to adopt a baby from Armenia.

~ OK! staff reporting on socialite Kim Kardashian’s consideration of adopting a child overseas as a single mother, OK Magazine, May 3

[Photo Credit: CeleBuzz]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Operation Rescue claims it has records of 86 women who obtained abortions at Aid for Women abortion clinic, which were disposed of improperly. The abortion clinic claims the records were stolen or falsified.
• Colleen Carol Campbell writes on our society’s often-held double-standard when it comes to the killing of people suffering from ailments like Alzheimer’s or dementia:
  

  Behind this sympathetic media treatment lurks a troubling double standard: the idea that behavior we would regard as cruel, selfish and criminal under any other circumstance is acceptable, even commendable, when directed to demented elders.The trend of glorifying murder-suicides among elders worries Donna Cohen, a University of South Florida psychology professor who studies the issue. Cohen told me that these cases, while rare, appear to be on the rise. And contrary to the “mercy killing” label, her research indicates that most women who die this way “are unaware and do not consent” to their deaths.

• Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan discuss religion, politics (including abortion) and Ross’ new book. The discussion on abortion starts around the 31:00 mark. It is quite interesting how Sullivan seems to have different categories for how Christians should attempt to influence the public based on what issue they’re discussing. He seems to believe Christian pro-lifers shouldn’t be involved with trying to change laws but simply focus on changing culture and then the laws will follow. As Douthat rightly points out, Sullivan doesn’t seem to believe the same for advocates of same-sex marriage. Nor would I guess he would have believed the same for the civil rights movement:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zsljbjM_4Q[/youtube]

by LauraLoo

Patricia Krentcil, who has been tanning ”her whole life,” is accused of child endangerment by bringing her young daughter into a tanning bed with her.

Patricia’s obvious addiction to tanning beds has fried her eyes.  Can she not see how her skin is permanently ruined?  And what’s going on with her lower-lip? Terrifying.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VlslA-qN98[/youtube]

Email LauraLoo with your Lunch Break suggestions.

Read my previous posts here and here.

News reports today are relaying contradictory yet alarming information about the well-being of Chinese pro-life dissident Chen Guangcheng and his family.

Previous reports indicated Chen wanted to remain in China after having escaped to the U.S. Embassy on April 22.

But after Chen was reunited with his wife – only after being returned by the U.S. to the Chinese – and learning how she was treated in his absence, he apparently changed his mind and wants to leave the country – on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plane, no less. Here is audio of a taped interview with The Guardian wherein Chen where he says he now wants out.

This entire Time piece is well worth reading and appears to give the most accurate account of events to date. Following are key excerpts:

A cluster of journalists is crowded around Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing, desperate for a glimpse of blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng. One of China’s most respected activists, Chen made a dramatic emergence from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on May 2, after spending six days sheltered there by the Americans. A last-minute deal secured an unorthodox solution to one of the world’s most sensitive diplomatic incidents in years: Chen, who has been locked up and beaten for years by officials furious that he dared expose a forced sterilization and abortion campaign in eastern Shandong province, would live on Chinese soil so long as the government would guarantee his life in a “safe environment,” according to the American side.

But today, he does not feel safe. Chen, who fractured his leg during his April 22 escape from extralegal house arrest, says he is a virtual prisoner in the hospital…..

What was supposed to be a successful diplomatic tango between the U.S. and China has turned into a rapid series of missteps that has the potential to make the Americans look less like Chen’s saviors and more like handmaidens to his continued misfortune….

His wife Yuan Weijing, who traveled with their two children to Beijing to meet him at Chaoyang Hospital, told him of her dreadful treatment by local Shandong thugs after his escape from house arrest in their stone farmhouse. He received news that threats to “beat her to death” had been made against Yuan. By Wednesday night, Chen was scared, upset, and virtually alone apart from his immediate family and an unfamiliar cavalcade of Chinese officialdom. Where were the Americans who had vowed to protect him, he asked foreign media? Why was his family not being given food at the hospital, to the point where one of his children was crying from hunger?…

According to Chen, U.S. officials said that they had tried to see him on Wednesday evening but that Chinese officials… would not give them access…. By Thursday afternoon, Chen said he had still not been able to meet face-to-face with American officials and that again they had tried to see him earlier in the day but had been stopped by Chinese forces….

The question now is whether the Americans, by either naïveté or otherwise, have left him to an uncertain fate by taking the Chinese at their word in their commitment to his safety and well-being. Will Chen really be allowed to go to university to study law? Will his friends be allowed to see him? What about his family members in Shandong who are still missing? Will he be bundled off by Chinese security agents when Clinton departs? Or will Chen’s now desperate pleas for asylum in America somehow be met? There are many questions. And so far, precious few answers, as Chen sits in a hospital with his wife and children, isolated from the world he so hoped to rejoin.

Meanwhile pro-life Republican Congressman Chris Smith will chair an emergency meeting of the U.S. House Congressional-Executive Commission on China this afternoon at 2p EST to discuss the ongoing crisis with Chen.

UPDATE 12:48p: Watch the hearing live here. Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers is scheduled to testify.

[Photo via Time]

Chinese women did not used to commit suicide at five times the world average, and it’s not normal that suicide is the number-one cause of death for young women in China….

But when asked, nobody knew the root causes. We as an organization felt strongly that it is related to the one-child policy, because we looked at the rate increasing after the policy was established.

~ Tessa Dale of All Girls Allowed, as quoted by One News Now, May 2

[Image via thinkquest.org]