Since I started writing for a living, I've been through intense periods of writing mostly about a single subject. There were a few years of international business, followed by time writing only on businesses in New York City. There were years spent on entrepreneurs, and years spent on the world's biggest companies.

For the last nearly 18 months, I have focused much of my energy on adoption, mostly adoption from Russia. On this blog and another, I've had the chance to explore the changes that have made Russian adoption now very different from what I first experienced in 1999.

Would somebody care to tell me what's going on at ABC News? This past week, the network posted not one, but four stories about child kidnapping and adoption. There was "China's Lost Children", "U.S. Adoptions Fueled by Guatemalan Kidnappings", "An Adoption Nightmare" and "Spirited Away: Japan Won't Let Abducted Kids Go".

The stories, all written or co-authored by Russell Goldman, are puzzling on many levels. Usually, packages of this sort are hung on a national or international news peg, but I can't find one. The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which could help curtail the adoption of children not legally free for adoption, came into force in the United States more than a month ago. National Missing Children's Day, created by John Walsh's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, is next week. UNICEF is preoccupied with Myanmar, China and children's health. There are no new statistics in the ABC reports, no novel number-crunching.

If you want to start a firestorm, forget the matches. All you really need to get a spark is to say you are going to do something about child welfare.

Want proof? Since Lisa told you a few months back about how UNICEF's child welfare stance favors anything but adoption, her post has been read more than 600 times. UNICEF sees its work as benevolent; its critics, like Elizabeth Bartholet, the founder and director of Harvard Law School's Child Advocacy Program, see the opposite. Here's what she wrote in an article just published in the Georgia State University Law Review:

Opposition to international adoption cannot be justified based on any best interest of the child principle, despite the claims of many children’s rights organizations. Instead it is grounded in a group of commonly shared but deeply flawed ideas about children and the role of the state, and driven by adult agendas that are not truly informed by children’s interests.

The National Council For Adoption put out a press release yesterday announcing that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is helping it launch a campaign to recruit more foster parents in the United States. The program is called " Families For All" and Wal-Mart is supporting it with a $75,000 donation.

So, being the kind of person who likes to put numbers in context, I started looking for some context for that number.

Wal-Mart is, according to Forbes, the 16th-largest company in the world, with annual sales that last year topped $378 billion. Last year, the Wal-Mart Foundation gave $296 million to charities in the U.S. and says that Wal-Mart employees and customers contributed another $106 million. (The foundation has a program to match hours spent in volunteering with a contribution to the volunteer's charity.) That, plus Wal-Mart's international giving put its total philanthropy for 2007 at $470 million.

Late last night, after the kids had gone to bed and Dancing With The Stars had danced, I got to sit down with my Russian cultural stash. This is the pile of books and magazines that I have put aside to read to learn about the country of my children's birth. It is an actual, physical pile, quite separate from all those Web site bookmarks that have piled up on del.icio.us.

What's in the pile? A copy of "War and Peace", since I'm trying to make some headway with the works of Leo Tolstoy. Several issues of Russian Life, a wonderful little bi-monthly that I discovered last year, as well as Readings, its quarterly literary companion. This latter magazine is a real gem since each issue takes a theme and then presents, in English, excerpts of Russian novels and poems on that theme. The first issue was subtitled "The hearts of dogs"; the second is "Three Russian springs". Many of the items are short enough to make them good reading with the kids. Oh, and in a fit of literary masochism, I asked the town library to see if it could get a hold of "The Magical Chorus", Solomon Volkov's new history of Russian culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn.