A traditional thief breaks into your house and steals televisions, jewelry and any cash that may be visible. Within minutes the house is ransacked and the criminal is gone. Your total losses are less than $1,000.

A white-collar criminal shows up at the county deed office with a bogus document reflecting your forged signature. Working with his associates, he then stages the sale of your property. At closing he walks away with a certified check from a financial institution.

When you discover the fraud, you now have to pay attorneys to retrieve not your television, jewelry and household cash, but the house itself. Your loses are now in the hundred thousands.

The only thing stranger than fiction is reality and mortgage fraud in all its varied forms is reality.

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After the fact, charges are being thrown back and forth about the inability of government agencies to protect children, while the murderers through their legal experts contrive new and innovative mental illness defenses.

Lost in the drama is the fact that in America, parents are murdering their children. This is not a Rowe vs. Wade issue. These are the lives of living, breathing, laughing, and crying human beings that are terminated for any number of reasons by those entrusted with their well being—their parents.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that between 1976 through 2002 61% of all children murdered under the age of 5 were killed by their parents (stepparents are included in the number).

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TORONTO (AP)—Hemophiliacs who received blood contaminated with the HIV virus and relatives of those too ill to come to court—or who have already died—were relieved Tuesday when the trial over Canada’s worst public health scandal finally got under way.

After weeks of delay, and initial fears that some charges could be thrown out, federal prosecutors proceeded with opening arguments in the trial against three Canadian health officials, a New Jersey pharmaceutical company and one of its senior American executives.

The Ontario Superior Court was packed with victims and family members of those who received the tainted blood products from New Jersey-based Armour Pharmaceutical Co. One HIV-positive woman sat with her husband and two daughters, a toilet paper roll at her side as she repeatedly dabbed at her eyes and glared at the defendants.

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