Seven thousand British children were sent to Australia last century, told they were orphans or unwanted. It wasn’t true. Now facing old age, 1,400 are still searching for their families

It wasn’t until he was 71 that Michael Lachmann found out what a different life he might have had. He had always believed he was an orphan. But, already an old man, he discovered he was never an orphan. He had been loved and wanted. During the second world war his mother had left letters at a residential nursery saying she was only placing him in care while she was working and until “daddy gets home from Japan and we will be making a home for little Michael”. There was no childcare then, unless you were rich.

Instead of being collected by his mother at the war’s end, at the age of five he was shipped to Australia and placed in the Castledare Boys Home, run by the Christian Brothers, where numerous boys were starved, beaten and subjected to sexual abuse. He was told his mother was dead.

Between the 1910s and 1970, 7,000 children aged between three and 14 were transported to Australia as part of Britain’s child migrant program. Promised a better life and loving families waiting to adopt, most were instead delivered into institutions where large numbers suffered abuse. Often their names or birth dates were changed, erasing their links to their families of origin. Very few were adopted or fostered.

One thousand and four hundred of those children are still looking for their birth families. Searching for any family who remain. Now old men and women, time is running out for these children to piece together who they are – while they still can.

Josephine Fenech from Mosta was 18 when she got pregnant 54 years ago. Back then, a teenage pregnancy out of wedlock was considered a big taboo. Something had to be done to hide the pregnancy.

The teenager and her parents moved to the US together with three of her siblings, while one brother stayed in Malta. When she gave birth in the US, she gave her newborn, who she called Jason, up for adoption. A year later, Josephine got married and had two sons and a daughter.

Seven years ago, Josephine passed away at the age of 65, taking her secrets with her to her grave.

Her son and his half-sister are now on a quest to trace the father, who they believe may have been a priest, and would like to get a DNA test to confirm.

Just three years ago, her daughter Jolene Usitalo found out she has an elder half-brother, Tim Grunert – as he was renamed by his adoptive parents. Now that they have established contact, they want to learn more about their background.

Mumbai Police arrested a man, Malikram, for kidnapping a two-year-old boy from Govandi. He reportedly

abducted the toddler after he and his wife were denied permission to adopt a child multiple times, citing

their financial condition and the fact that his wife is handicapped. Malikram has two daughters from his

first wife, however, he is not allowed to meet them.

I was about 9 years old when I made a startling discovery. I realized I liked women rather than men. Of course, I didn’t know terms like lesbian, gay etc. In fact terms like queer and homosexual also were probably not coined. How did I find out I was gay ? In every movie we watched, I would fall in love with and have a crush on the heroine rather than the hero. I felt protective & wanted to put my arms around her. For eg I drooled over Saira Banu rather than Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore rather than Rajesh Khanna. Julie Andrews in “Sound of Music” rather than Christopher Plummer, Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday” rather than Gregory Peck. And the list was endless. It seemed the most natural thing – being that way.

Till I realized a few years later that it was considered immoral, bad etc. Of course, to me it was the most normal, natural feeling. And I was ready to fight with anyone who thought otherwise.

Like many women, I always had one dream – to have a child of my own. The only difference between me & other women being that they were married while I was a lesbian woman in a same sex union.

I always had a very strong maternal instinct and wanted a child to love & cherish. The problem was I knew I was never going to marry. And as I grew older and got into a live-in lesbian relationship, I thought well, why not adopt a child instead ? I thought it was a simple matter of applying to an Adoption Agency. Till reality hit.

My partner & I have been trying to adopt a child, unsuccessfully, for the last 10 years. The reason ? The current Adoption Laws in our country do not allow same sex couples to adopt a child, simply because they are not recognised as a “couple” or cannot legally marry according to the prevailing Marriage laws.

The Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto agreed to pay a US$15 million penalty to settle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the accusation that it had paid $10.5 million to a friend of former Guinean President Alpha Condé to retain globally important iron ore rights.

The settlement agreement with the U.S. stock exchange regulator said that in 2011, Rio hired a “close friend of a former senior Guinean government official” to help it keep hold of blocks 3 and 4 of the Simandou mountain range, considered to hold some of the world’s largest iron ore reserves.

Blocks 1 and 2 had been canceled by a previous regime in 2008, and controversially granted to Beny Steinmetz Group Resources.

The SEC found that the consultant in the middle of the scandal paid $200,000 to buy T-shirts for Condé’s re-election campaign, soon after receiving his first payment from Rio Tinto.

While the settlement anonymises individuals connected to the bribery, leaked emails reveal that the unnamed “senior government official” is President Condé, and the anonymous “French investment banker” is François Polge de Combret, a friend of Condé from his student days in Paris.

Child Adoption is the legal process by which a child or minor is made a a part of a family he is not biologically connected to.

It should be noted that child adoption is different from Child fostering, which is the process of a child being placed under the care of a caregiver or guardian (known as a ” foster parent”) licensed to do so by the state .

This article will be looking at child adoption as it currently exists under Nigerian Law, with a focus on the topics of :-

– The legal framework governing child adoption in Nigeria.

– Who is qualified to be adopted in Nigeria.

Discrimination laws have been at the heart of the conflict between faith-based adoption agencies and local government bureaucracies for years. Faith-based agencies argue for the right to operate according to their beliefs, even if it means adopting only to heterosexual couples. Local governments are responsible for ensuring that the agencies they partner with abide by local discrimination laws.

In a surprising settlement regarding this very issue, New York state officials have agreed to pay $250,000 in attorneys' fees and costs after attempting for years to shutter New Hope Family Services' doors. New Hope's supposed offense? Operating in accordance with its religious beliefs.

While this is a positive outcome, it’s unfortunate that the city targeted New Hope for several years, forcing the organization to participate in time-consuming and costly litigation, via Alliance Defending Freedom, to defend itself for doing something that was well within its First Amendment purview.

Two rulings predated the settlement. One ruling in 2020 temporarily ruled in favor of the faith-based adoption provider. Another ruling in 2022 prohibited the state of New York from enforcing state law "insofar as it would compel New Hope to process applications from, or place children for adoption with, same-sex couples or unmarried cohabitating couples, and insofar as it would prevent New Hope from referring such couples to other agencies."

New Hope is a nonprofit adoption agency and pregnancy center that helps new mothers. While adoptive parents do pay fees, the organization operates without government funding and through private funding from churches, donors, and private grants. For four years, the New York Office of Children and Family Services agency threatened to shut it down, despite the fact that it received no state funding, because New Hope would only place children with a married mother and father, based on orthodox religious beliefs.

Following VG's revelations about illegal adoption, Minister for Children and Families Kjersti Toppe (Sp) is now inviting adoptees to a meeting. - I want to bring to light what has happened, she says.

VG has told the story of Camilla Austbø (37) who was illegally adopted to Norway.

Camilla was three years old when she was abducted from her own home in Ecuador, sold, and adopted to an unsuspecting couple in Skien.

VG has also told the story of Simon and several other adoptees from Ecuador. All came to Norway via a lawyer who was accused of buying and selling children for adoption.

Now Minister for Children and Families Kjersti Toppe wants to meet them.

Urteil im Prozess

Pforzheimer CDU-Stadträtin Oana Krichbaum diffamiert: Freiheitsstrafe für Angeklagte

Die Pforzheimer Stadträtin Oana Krichbaum wurde in den sozialen Medien und in Mails mehrfach des illegalen Kinderhandels bezichtigt. Nun erhielt die Angeklagte eine Freiheitsstrafe.

Gunther und Oana Krichbaum als Delegierte beim Bundesparteitag der CDU in Hannover

Nebenkläger: Oana und Gunter Krichbaum sahen sich auf Facebook bösen Behauptungen ausgesetzt. Foto: Oana Krichbaum

A woman from the Enz district was sentenced to six months imprisonment without probation by the Foreign Chamber of the Karlsruhe Regional Court on Wednesday for defamation.

The woman was accused of repeatedly calling Oana Krichbaum, the wife of MP Gunther Krichbaum (CDU), both of whom acted as joint plaintiffs, as a child trafficker on Facebook. With the verdict, a story that has been smoldering for years comes to an end – at least for the time being.

4,000 pages of court files have accumulated in the process

In 2019, after five days of hearings, the district court sentenced the woman to six months probation. Both the defendants' defense and the public prosecutor's office had appealed against this. The process, which has now come to an end, dragged on for eleven days of negotiations, during which a mountain of files of around 4,000 pages had accumulated.

In his detailed reasoning, Judge Stefan Bien emphasized that the previously unconvicted defendant could not be dealt with by a suspended sentence. This is shown by the fact that she did not accept the 2019 judgment and then continued her activities. According to Bien, several disciplinary decisions in civil proceedings could not have slowed the woman down. "Only detention will stop them," the judge said.