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Meet the businessman who transformed foster care and made millions in the process

The fun starts when the interview ends. Jim Cockburn has sat through a two-hour inquisition.

There’s been laughter aplenty. There’s also been more self-analysis in an afternoon than this exceptionally successful businessman is used to in a year. From the airy confines of his light, minimalist, Edwardian office, the man who single-handedly transformed the fostering system not just in the UK but around the world has reflected on his improbably successfully career. It began in the West Midlands and saw him make tens of millions of pounds.

Having opened newsagents, the worst thing he ever did, he went on to buy supreme race horses in a bid to win the Derby. Having started with nothing he built a business and bought out his fellow directors for £25 million. He’s lost large sums of money on failed ventures, the inevitable misdirected punt on Chinese imports among them, while generating considerable wealth that has bought him a valuable collection of contemporary art and two stunning homes.

When we get to the end of the interview, Jim’s shoulders relax. “Have you seen the Tipton Monkey?” he asks. I shake my head in apology. I’ve not. “Have you? He’s brilliant.” We’ve spent two hours talking about protecting children from abuse, dozens of business ventures and art. But at the end there’s a swell of relief as he gets back to the banter he loves.

“It’s hilarious,” he says, describing a YouTube video of a Black Country man whose face is converted through the magic of computer software to that of a monkey. “He says he’s been in Dudley Zoo for years but he goes home every night, to Tipton. He loves living in Tipton. He doesn’t stay in the zoo overnight, he just turns up each day to make a few quid from the punters then he goes home.”

Netra wants to divorce her adoptive parents: 'Many people think I'm mega ungrateful'

- They have never been my parents, says 27-year-old Netra Sommer.

"How lucky are you that you were adopted to Denmark."

It is a phrase that many adoptees hear throughout their lives, especially if they come from poor countries.

Netra Sommer does that.

She was born in Mumbai and spent the first part of her life in an orphanage in a poor Indian area until she was adopted to Denmark.

o‘I want to see you once’: Adpted woman’s plea to biological mother as she extends search to Australia

‘I want to see you once’: Adopted woman’s plea to biological mother as she extends search to Australia

Indian born Italian in search of mum

Source: Navya Dorigatti

A woman who was born in an orphanage in India and was adopted by an Italian couple at the age of two, is searching for her biological mother after 34 years. As part of her quest, she has intensified her search to Australia in the hope of meeting her mother at least once in her lifetime.

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A SPECIAL ADOPTION: THE STORY OF JANA, SANGEETHA AND STEFANO

When they decided to start a family, Sangeetha and Stefano opted for international adoption, giving them the availability to welcome children with reversible diseases such as cleft lip and palate. This is their story.

“My name is Sangeetha, I was born in India 37 years ago and at five I was adopted by an Italian family. Today I live in the province of Brescia with my husband Stefano and our 7-year-old adopted daughter Jana, born in Kottur, India, just like me. "

Sangeetha has always felt the desire to relive, as a mother, the experience of adoption. When she and Stefano decided to start a family they had no doubts and India seemed to them the logical continuation of their path.

"Our intention was to give willingness to accept children with certain reversible pathologies, those that we felt capable of dealing with, such as cleft lip and palate ."

In accepting this pathology, the experience of Stefano, born with cleft lip, also weighed . A further element that, in some way, closed the circle.

‘I want to see you once’: Adopted woman’s plea to biological mother as she extends search to Australia

“Dear mum, my biggest dream in this world is to meet you. Only one time in life, just to see you if possible… please come back to me.”

 

In an emotional plea, Navya Dorigatti, has launched an intensive search for her biological mother and is asking her to come forward at least once.

 

Navya was born in Calicut, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, in 1984. However, she was left behind by her biological mother in an orphanage and thereafter was adopted by an Italian couple at the age of two.

 

 

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Liberia: Mariah Luyken Found Guilty of Child Trafficking After Two Years of Legal Battle

26 OCTOBER 2020FrontPageAfrica (Monrovia)

By Lennart Dodoo

Monrovia — Criminal Court 'B' at the Temple of Justice has adjudged Ms. Mariah Luyken guilty of child trafficking. She was found liable of sending the children of two Liberian women to the United States of America without the consent of their mothers, Mathaline Johnson & Elizabeth Johnson.

She was accused along with two alleged accomplices Ernest Urey and Edwin Walk, but the Court ruled that the prosecution did not provide sufficient evidence to link the alleged cohorts.

Last Friday's ruling ends a two-year case that has been dangling in the courts.

Catholic Charities of Baltimore ends international adoption program

BALTIMORE (CNS) -- After more than 75 years helping form families through international adoption, Catholic Charities of Baltimore has closed its international adoption program.

The agency cited changing circumstances within other countries and a "negative stance" toward international adoption from the U.S. government.

Ellen Warnock, who has worked in the international adoption program for 36 years, called the Sept. 30 decision "heartbreaking" but necessary due to a dramatic decline in the number of children annually entering the United States for adoption.

In the early 2000s, more than 23,000 children came into the country each year for adoption. In 2019, that number declined to just 2,900.

"Some of the countries are either unwilling to send children overseas because it's a national pride issue or because the infrastructure that they have is such that it cannot meet the documentation standards of our government's immigration process," said Warnock, associate administrator at Catholic Charities' Center for Family Services.

Mumbai: After falling in trap, adoptive parents set up foundation to clean up system

Mumbai: After falling in trap, adoptive parents set up foundation to clean up system

TNN | Oct 26, 2020, 07.13 AM IST

Mumbai: After falling in trap, adoptive parents set up foundation to clean up system

MUMBAI: Delhi residents Abhinav Aggarwal and his wife, awaiting custody of their four-year-old son after a city civil court earlier this month declared them his adoptive parents, launched a foundation on Sunday to streamline the adoption system and create awareness.

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Attack at Supreme Court

About a dozen of women on Friday October 23, attacked and beat up Madam Maria Morgan Luyken, accused of trafficking over 550 Liberian children out of the country to the United States at the entrance of the Cafeteria at the Temple of Justice.

She had gone into the cafeteria to speak to her lawyer before the final verdict in the child trafficking case against her. It was at that point that she was intercepted by supporters of the mothers who have filed the child trafficking case against her.

It took the efforts of court securities and others to rescue her from lynching by the angry women.

The beating up of Maria Morgan Luyken on the grounds of the Supreme Court came hours before a child trafficking guilty verdict was handed down against her at the Criminal Court “B”.

The incident on Friday, is a clear example of how the country appears to be sliding into lawlessness. Attacking a person on the grounds of the Temple of Justice is prohibited here.

Orphanages, communist ghettos

Ceausescu's dictatorship killed thousands of children in orphanages. Post-communist samsars made fortunes by selling souls abroad under the authority of the authorities.

In the first days after the fall of communism and then for years in a row, the local but especially the international press made shocking reports about children in Romania suffering from AIDS, about children in orphanages and about the so-called "street children". All of them had in common Ceausescu's camps populated with the souls of the innocent. According to UNICEF, 700 orphanages housed about 100,000 children. The foreign press published hundreds of reports from orphanages in which 60% of children abandoned in maternity hospitals and hospitalized in these ghettos, with very serious disabilities, died after two or three years. Malnutrition and poor health care, lack of drugs or the interest of doctors were the main causes of childhood morbidity. Those who escaped until they became adults and were thrown into the streets from those establishments were left with lifelong sequelae. Some of them managed to find a job and integrate socially, but most were expelled or discriminated against by society, as is still the case today to a large extent with any minority: ethnic, religious, sexual and more. . Others, on the periphery of society, became criminals, victims of the demographic policy of the communist dictatorship that banned abortions. Thousands of children died, thousands of women died who tried to get rid of pregnancy by old methods, some of them downright barbaric. as is still the case today to a large extent with any minority: ethnic, religious, sexual and more. Others, on the periphery of society, became criminals, victims of the demographic policy of the communist dictatorship that banned abortions. Thousands of children died, thousands of women died who tried to get rid of pregnancy by old methods, some of them downright barbaric. as is still the case today to a large extent with any minority: ethnic, religious, sexual and more. Others, on the periphery of society, became criminals, victims of the demographic policy of the communist dictatorship that banned abortions. Thousands of children died, thousands of women died who tried to get rid of pregnancy by old methods, some of them downright barbaric.

In 1990 I went with a colleague from the magazine where I was working at an orphanage in Bucharest on Christmas Eve. The children camped on sweets and clothes bought with the help of colleagues, pulled on sweaters, pants, socks, those who managed to get their hands on an item of clothing ran away and hid under the rusty iron beds. And they never left. Many of them were naked, naked, with only skin and bone. When we wanted to leave, they encamped us in bunches, they held our clothes, they prayed for us to stay. "Take me in your arms, take me home with you," they prayed. Some swayed in one on rusty beds, suffered from autism, behavioral disorders or other mental illnesses. Inside, he smelled of urine, unwashed laundry, and baby sweat.

The orphanages were littered with rats, the children were starving, cold, washed with a cold water hose. But the caregivers took it well, took the food from the children's mouths, and so as not to be interrupted by crocheting, they beat them like animals. After December ’89, trucks with food and clothing from the West began to arrive. Many stopped at the gates of the orphanages. But the children were still starving and naked, because humanitarian aid was being handed over and taken home by the staff of those ghettos, from the director to the caregivers and doctors.

Children in orphanages, a commodity for soul mates