Lawyer, Arizona elected official and former missionary to the Marshall Islands Paul Petersen has received six years in federal prison from the state of Arkansas for arranging illegal adoptions of Marshallese babies. He still faces up to 31.5 years more in total from trials in Utah and Arizona for the same crimes. 

Timothy Banks, a federal judge in Arkansas, handed Petersen the sentence over video.

Petersen’s crime involved the illegal transport of individuals into the U.S. for private profit. There were estimated to be at least 70 cases, from which he took in over $2.7 million from adoptive parents.

Petersen claimed that he did not know what he did was illegal. However, he gave statements to government officials which he knew to be false in several states while arranging adoptions. Statements included dates of mothers’ arrivals and residencies.
 

Further discrediting the claim of ignorance is that the defendant also was a practicing attorney who was for six years the assessor for the Phoenix metro area. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the U.S.
 

She provides a secure nest for abandoned, lost and orphaned children

Rewati Rau

This little bespectacled girl is all of two. She likes meeting people but is too shy. Try picking her up, and she’ll jump right out of your arms. Tanu (name changed) is among the group of 23 children who are part of the Welfare Home for Children in Sarita Vihar. Mostly in the age group of 0-8 years. A few are orphans here, there are others who are lost and some have just been abandoned by their parents for various reasons.

Set up in 1979 by Achla Khanna, Welfare Home for Children has been giving shelter to such children from across the city for the last four decades.

Police said, they got a tip-off about a gang of women visiting Jagtap dairy area for the sale of an infant

PUNE Wakad police have arrested six women in a child trafficking case in Kalewadi area of Pimpri Chinchwad city on Friday.
Accordingly, police laid that trap and questioned the women who stepped out from two auto rickshaws. As they failed to provide satisfactory answers they were detained. (REPRESENTATIVE PIC)

Police said, they got a tip-off about a gang of women visiting Jagtap dairy area for the sale of an infant.

The accused have been identified as Saida Bhimrao Kamble (35) from Shivajinagar; Supriya Sharad Waghmare (39) from Dhankawadi; Lalita Dattatreya Giri Gosavi (45) from Yerawada; Afarin Danesh Sheikh (25) from Hadapsar; Amrin Rahid Sayyad (32) from Yerawada and Asma Javed Sheikh (30) from Hadapsar.

During investigation police recovered conversations about the deal and they had also shared photos of the infants.

The Search For My Daughter’s Birth Mom

“In 2013, on a dusty, deserted road in Southern Ethiopia, four of us headed deep into a village in search of my daughter’s birthmother. Navigating the bumps and dodging an occasional goat, Asfaw drove us to where it all began.

As luck would have it, my driver spoke the language of the region as well as Amharic and English, and the older gentleman in the passenger seat beside him held in his lap a large book with the details of hundreds of adoptions. Just a few hours earlier, seated in the garden of the Abebe Zeleke Hotel, he had opened that book and confirmed the information I had been given on my daughter years ago—the name of her mother and the region where she was from. And he knew how to find her. I looked out the window. Despite the aridity, the landscape was lush; replete with the large leaves of the false banana trees. The anticipation was indescribable.

The search for my daughter’s birth mother was more than twice as long as the lengthy process of international adoption (which for me was two years, five months—plus an additional 4 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days waiting for a referral—according to my blog). After not finding success in adopting through the DC foster care system and being dissuaded from pursuing domestic adoption from the agencies themselves, I landed on international adoption, hopeful that I could have an open relationship with my daughter’s Ethiopian family. When I submitted my paperwork to the agency in June 2009, there were a handful of countries open. I chose Ethiopia because I had read the children were well taken care of and the country didn’t appear to be engaging in unethical practices.

I had also spent a month volunteering at an orphanage in Addis Ababa the year before and the experience had been nothing but positive. I loved the country and its people and was beyond excited to have it inextricably woven into my own family fabric. I was aware that some countries had been exposed for coercing or paying birthmothers to give up their children; others flat-out abducting and trafficking kids to meet the demand of families wanting to adopt. But in my research, I hadn’t heard of such things happening in Ethiopia. In addition, the agency I chose was recommended to me by an adoptive mom who said they facilitated birth mother introductions and she believed them to be above board. Satisfied, I forged ahead, open to a boy or a girl from birth to age 3.

Greek authorities have arrested a Bulgarian national involved in an illegal child adoption ring operating between Bulgaria and Greece. The 30-year-old man was detained during a routine identity check in central Athens.

Police report that the individual is connected to at least six cases of illicit adoption involving Bulgarian children. As part of a criminal network, the man targeted vulnerable pregnant women in Bulgaria, offering them money in exchange for their newborns, which were then transferred to Greece for adoption.

Investigations reveal that he facilitated the transactions between the mothers and a network consisting of doctors and lawyers who helped legalize these adoptions. The man is said to have received over 10,000 euros for his role in brokering the arrangements.

The price per child has now escalated to over 30,000 euros, according to anti-trafficking investigators. Authorities have presented undisputed evidence proving the suspect profited from the sale of children. He has been referred to the prosecutor's office for further legal proceedings.

Finding a surrogate in Colombia is as easy as buying or selling a second-hand car in the classified ads. One need only go on Facebook to find dozens of ads: “Surrogate for hire, I’m from Colombia,” says one. “Hello, I am interested in becoming a surrogate. Strong womb and pregnancies without complications,” reads another. Like a huge auction, the messages compete with each other to offer potential clients what they believe are the most advantageous conditions. On these same websites, buyers make their demands clear. In general, the interested parties are looking for what any customer would seek in a classified ad: good quality at a fair price.

In Colombia, buying babies through surrogacy is becoming increasingly common. This practice – which is prohibited in Spain, France, Germany and elsewhere – is not regulated in Colombia. Dozens of agencies and clinics take advantage of that legal vacuum to do business, usually with foreigners who go to the Andean country looking for a surrogate and as little red tape as possible.

Yamile is a 33-year-old from Barranquilla. She is one of the women who advertising her services as a surrogate in an online forum. “We have a clinic here that does the whole procedure for you, and I have a cousin who takes care of all the paperwork for us,” she tells a potential client over the phone. Yamile can’t bring herself to say when she will be paid.

- How much are they offering?

- 20 million pesos [about $4,000].

At least 2,000 babies were born to Black GIs stationed in Britain during the second world war and a home was created for some of them: Holnicote House in Somerset. Those who grew up there are now telling their stories

When Carol Edwards and her daughter went on a walking weekend to Holnicote House, a hotel on Exmoor in Somerset, a guide gave them a tour of the property, explaining the estate’s 500-year history. “The story ended at about 1945,” Edwards says. “So afterwards, I said to him: ‘You missed a section out.’” Edwards knew this because she had lived at Holnicote House for the first five years of her life, along with 25 other children like her, immediately after the second world war. All of the children were orphans, all were mixed race: their mothers were white British women, their fathers were African American GIs who had been stationed in Britain during the war.

Edwards was one of what US newspapers would call “brown babies”. At least 2,000 of these children were born during the war, at a time when there were just 7-10,000 Black people in the entire UK. So these “brown babies” increased the population of Black Britons by about 25 per cent. Over half are believed to have been given up for adoption, but Holnicote House, which was requisitioned by Somerset county council in 1943, was the only children’s home specifically dedicated to them. Edwards, 79, has positive memories of her time there. “They cared for us and they loved us all,” she says. “We were all treated the same and never made to feel different … I really do feel quite privileged to have spent my first five years there. I think I was one of the lucky ones.”

For the other “brown babies” the picture is more varied, says Dr Chamion Caballero, cofounder of the Mixed Museum, a digital archive of Britain’s history of racial mixing. They carried the double stigma of being mixed race and being born outside marriage, and they were treated as a problem by the authorities. “No one knew what to do with them,” she says. Most of them found themselves the only person of colour in very white rural areas, where they stood out, experienced discrimination and had no connection to Black communities. Those that did gravitate to Black communities in cities like London, Liverpool or Bristol also often faced discrimination for being “not Black enough”.

In short:

An Indonesian man has been charged after allegedly selling his child on Facebook for the equivalent of about $1,450 to buy two mobile phones and fund online gambling.

The child was recovered from the couple that bought him and returned to his mother last week.

What's next?

Experts say economic incentives for struggling mothers and a lack information about legal adoption are part of the reason why baby trafficking remains a problem in Indonesia.

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