Sunday Overview.

RIP Bill Granger, aka Joe Gash.
Longtime Chicago newspaperman, and gritty city mystery author.

Raised in South Chicago, Mr. Granger attended St. Ambrose Elementary School, graduated from the De La Salle Institute in Bronzeville and then attended DePaul University, where he edited the school's DePaulia newspaper. While still in college, he joined UPI's Chicago bureau as a reporter.

"He told me that all he wanted to be was a newspaperman," his wife said. "And he wanted to do that the old-fashioned way, starting out as a copy boy and then rising through the ranks. But then (legendary Chicago journalist) Mike Royko told him, 'You can't do that anymore.' "

While serving in the Army in the mid-1960s, Mr. Granger moonlighted for a time as a night copy boy at the Washington Post, where he met his future wife, who was an intern.

After leaving active Army duty, Mr. Granger joined the Tribune in 1966 as a neighborhood news reporter, covering a broad range of topics. Retired Chicago Tribune reporter William Mullen remembered Mr. Granger as a "superb reporter and writer" during those years who was particularly skilled at covering breaking news.

"He was one of the quickest, fastest people I've ever seen out on the street," Mullen said. "He'd be taking down notes and would run for a pay phone and instead of turning in notes, he would just dictate the entire story, right off the top of his head."

In early 1969, Mr. Granger joined the Sun-Times, where he became a feature writer and TV columnist. He left the Sun-Times in 1978 and immediately began a dual career as an author and freelance columnist for the Tribune.

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Welcome to the world, David and Wm. Romney.
Twin sons born to Tagg Romney, via surrogate mother.
How... non-conservative(?), that family planning.
Sincere congrats to him and his wife, and the little big brother.

ADDED: Actually, it sounds like there are four older siblings to the twins.

ABC’s The Note reported that the couple used the same surrogate for their youngest son, Jonathan, born in August 2010. Their other three children were not born via surrogacy.

Neither in vitro fertilization — which is one step in a gestational surrogacy pregnancy — nor the surrogacy itself are uncommon nowadays. But to some parts of the anti-abortion movement, they remain controversial because “excess” fertilized embryos can be destroyed. The Catholic Church opposes IVF.

And the handbook of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not rule out IVF for a married couple. It does say the church “strongly discourages surrogate motherhood.”

That single sentence, however, doesn’t explain how the church is defining surrogacy, or necessarily how it would regard this particular case.
...

Michael Purdy, a spokesman for the LDS Church, told the Associated Press that, while the church discourages surrogate motherhood, it leaves the decision to individual members.

A campaign official said the babies were born Friday and that Tagg Romney “made the bishops in his church aware of his family’s plans.”

Asked whether Mitt Romney had publicly expressed views on IVF or surrogacy, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul emailed his position on stem cell research. He has repeatedly voiced support for stem cell research using excess embryos from IVF under “appropriate ethical boundaries.”

According to a biography written by a distant Romney relative, Ronald B Scott, a former Time Inc writer, at least three of Mitt Romney’s sons have used in vitro fertilization.

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Little discussed last week, lost in the coverage of whether the president's pre-dawn visit to Afghanistan was a successful campaign stunt or not, was the paperwork the president signed, committing U.S. monetary resources to that beleaguered country, via the proven untrustworthy "ally" Hamid Karzai.

Christiane Amanpour, about as trustworthy an international reporter as we're going to get, applauded the deal. Pulling out too soon, on an announced timetable leaving nothing behind would leave the ground ripe for re-organization, as happened when the Soviet Union was previously humbled on this same turf.

Still... it's just another piece of the future, promised away on behalf of Americans to come with little honest discussion of the costs or consequences, for what might prove to be little or no true gain. Particularly if the money doesn't go where it supposed to go, or bring peace and prosperity as promised.

After signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, American officials say they have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous.

Eager to raise an American flag and open a consulate in a bustling downtown district of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, officials in 2009 sought waivers to stringent State Department building rules and overlooked significant security problems at the site, documents show. The problems included relying on local building techniques that made the compound vulnerable to a car bombing, according to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that was obtained by The Washington Post.

The decision to give up on the site is the clearest sign to date that, as the U.S.-led military coalition starts to draw down troops amid mounting security concerns, American diplomats are being forced to reassess how to safely keep a viable presence in Afghanistan. The plan for the Mazar-e Sharif consulate, as laid out in a previously undisclosed diplomatic memorandum, is a cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning and the type of stark choices the U.S. government will have to make in coming years as it tries to wind down its role in the war.

Plus this:

The hours-long attack in September on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from a nearby building under construction renewed concerns about the vulnerabilities of the Mazar-e Sharif site.

“The entire compound is surrounded by buildings with overwatch and there is almost no space on the compound that cannot be watched, or fired upon, from an elevated position outside the compound,” Kelly wrote.

Responding effectively to an emergency at the consulate would be next to impossible, Kelly noted, because the facility does not have space for a Black Hawk helicopter to land. It would take a military emergency response team 11 / 2 to 2 hours to reach the site “under good conditions,” he said.

In December, embassy officials began exploring alternative short-term sites for their diplomatic staff in northern Afghanistan. A Western diplomat familiar with the situation said the United States has sought, so far in vain, to persuade the German and Swedish governments to sublet it. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said European diplomats have found the prospect laughable.