Of course we would care. If Roman Polanski was butcher from Sandiego, as opposed to a director from Hollywood, who plead guilty, then skipped the country. We would still care.

He might not have gotten the protection he got had he been a butcher in France, but we would have cared.

Rapists do go free on legal technicallities and that is the law. In this case, Roman fled prosecution, and others who have similarly fled prosecution are just as hounded by our law enforcement officials, even when they flee to allies (like Isreal or England or in this case France).

We may on ocasion let justice fail, but we never cease in seeing that justice is executed.

Criminals may walk free, and innocent men may go to jail, but all get a trial first, and if they flee, we chase them for as long and as far as we can.

I doubt Mr. Polanski will get leniency now that he has evaded capture for so long.

That a European law enforcement agency finally decided to aknowledge that this extradition should go forward.

Mr. Polanski can appeal his decision, and claim his innocence in a court of law now, as he should have at the time.

Whatever the details of the case, justice, what ever that might be in this case, can now be carried out.

An interesting story I was once told of a friend of my parents in the 60's who had adopted a child from Poland.

The child arrived, and of course was dressed all in pink, with pink blanket and other such pink items.

The reason for this is of course, because (as they were told) it was tradition in poland to wrap little baby girls in blue (the color of the virigin mary) and little boys in pink (to symbolize the blood of christ).

In either case, children are routinely wrapped in pastles, because as they are small children we adults want to sooth them and imagine, pastles are soothing.

There's nothing particularly engendering about the colors, there's also nthing particularly engendering about the toys. Boys and Girls will play with their toys the way they want to. which will likely include both action adventure, and narative stories as the child develops their own sense of self and use their toys to explore these ideas.

The basic problem with any studies is that they reduce children to numbers. And while it may be true that 50 - 99 % of boys do x and girls do y, when you're looking a population of 6 billion human beings the odds of you having an exception and not a rule child aren't so out there.

So when you say, girls talk more, that fine, but ignores the fact that your daughter may talk less, or your son may talk more.

Boys may be hard wired to enjoy trucks, and girls hard wired to play with dolls, except your kid who loves the drama of doll play and the excitment of directed action play.

Some boys will cuddle their cars, and some girls will make their dollies fight.

Likewise, you as a parent might not be any great shakes either, especially if you are worrying about whether your son is conforming to destructive sterotypes, or your daughter is bucking them.

In the end, you kind of have to approach your child as an individual. By the time your child is between two and three they will let you know their interest, grabbing things off the shelves at the store, and requesting television programming (and throwing tantrums when they don't get it). And after that they start progressing at a rate that makes trying to direct their interests all but impossible. So long as your refusal is based on monetary or spoilage concerns, and not, that's a boy toy or a girl toy.

Really since the mergeing of toy manufacture and animation in the 80's there are no more boy or girl toys. Every toy has both an active play componant and a narative arc (not to mention both male and female charactes to identify with). As such you can have snake eyes fight storm shadow, or explore a love triangle between Scarlett, Snake Eyes, and Rip Chord. You can play Barbie and Ken Super Spys, or you can send them to the wine country where they have a big fight.

Even Tonka has anthopamorphised their trucks so that you can either have them haul sand or discuss their feelings.

Gender nutral is kind of like race nutral. The more you worry about it, the harder it is to claim nutrality. But if you don't worry about it, and just be your self, things work out much better.

"Invariably, Business wants an unfair market to shore up their own market share".

Markets, want to be level to ensure peak efficiency and distribution of services.

My appologies.