"I note the silence on katlaughing's post and believe it speaks volumes."

You mean the one at 27 Jan 08 - 10:45 AM, Mick?

I can't see it was a post that really calling for comments, though the story was interesting enough (allowing for the fact that the Daily Mail is more or less the equivalent of your Fox News in general).

"They also had some great fun tales of all the other girls that they had met" is just what you'd expect," - no doubt true, - and it's just what you would expect an English mum to take some pride in saying, partly because it says a lot for the gumption of the girls in a difficult situation.

The slightly barbed quote "The girls had an interesting insight into the life of a 'removed' child in New York City" rather ties in with the point I'd been making, about the real significance of this being as a kind of (unflattering) litmus test of the quality of an aspect of social services in New York.

I'm sure someone somewhere is working on a screenplay based on this incident. Probably with Dawn French as the mum...