The Tuam Babies Family Group is “sceptical” of Minister Roderic O’Gorman’s pledge that a mass exhumation will go ahead at the former Galway mother and baby home next year.

Members claim the children’s minister is being “opportunistic and reactive” as he made the pledge following the broadcast of The Missing Children documentary on RTÉ One last Tuesday.

Annette McKay, whose sister Mary Margaret died at the Tuam mother and baby home in Co Galway, said the minister was “out of touch” if he truly believed exhumation could go ahead next year.

“There are a number of issues with what Roderic O’Gorman said. First of all, who is in charge of the exhumation? Is it gardaí, a coroner? Legally, that has to be decided,” she said.

"There is an ongoing criminal investigation by gardaí. That must be considered. Has it been? Ideally, we would like to see a coroner appointed to oversee this next step. But all of this will take considerable time.

Thiruvananthapuram: Phone conversation showing that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan

knew about the adoption of Anupama’s child before it came out through media has been

leaked. The conversation between the complainant Anupama and CPM leader P K

Sreemathy has been leaked.

P K Sreemathy can be heard saying to Anupama that the Chief Minister said that the

Thiruvananthapuram: Former student activist Anupama S Chandran is

preparing for another round of agitation, this time before the office of

the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare over the controversial

adoption of her child.

She alleged that the inquiry into the case was not going on in the right

Immediately after her birth in Sri Lanka, Sharinda Nathaliya Wolffers (33) was adopted by Dutch parents. This year she saw her biological mother for the first time. "People who can't have children and therefore adopt, give me a bad taste."

“You are not able to take care of your baby, sisters in the Sri Lankan monastery, where I was born, told my mother. You better give your daughter up for adoption.

My mother was not married to my father during the pregnancy. That is really not possible for a poor woman in Sri Lanka, who has little money to live on.

My adoptive mother realized that her happiness meant my birth mother's grief

Sharinda Nathaliya Wolfers

Hollywood actress and former wife of director Woody Allen, Mia Farrow wants to come to India to care for deprived children.

''I would like to be a relief worker,'' says Farrow, who already has a family of 13 adopted children including a 10-year-old boy from Calcutta.

In an interview to The Sunday Times, London, the 53-year-old actress scoffed at suggestions that she might see herself as a latter-day Mother Teresa. ''Make no mistake, it is not charity. I am getting more out of it than I put in,'' she says.

In fact, she had planned out her life from the time when she was a nine-year-old suffering from a polio attack. The month she spent in a hospital at Beverly Hills surrounded by children fighting for survival completely changed the course of her life.

''It changed my view of life. I became aware that everybody did not live happily in Beverly Hills, that there was a precariousness to our existence.''

Grounded in her human-rights work, Mia Farrow can look back at another triumph—the loving home she created for 14 adopted and biological children. But she must also continue to deal with the wreckage from the sensational scandal that almost rent it apart 20 years ago. From Farrow and eight of her kids, including the long-silent Dylan, Maureen Orth gets the full story of life before and after Woody Allen.

Mia Farrow has had a big life. After a childhood in Beverly Hills and London with a movie-star mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, and a writer-director father, John Farrow, she became famous at 19 on Peyton Place, a sensation when it premiered in 1964 as television’s first prime-time soap opera. She lost her virginity to Frank Sinatra and married him when she was 21 and he was 50. Two years later he served her divorce papers on the set of Rosemary’s Baby, the Roman Polanski film for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination in 1968. Frank and Mia stayed close, however, even when she was married to the composer-conductor André Previn, whom she divorced in 1979, after having three sons and adopting three at-risk Asian daughters. She also continued to see Sinatra throughout her 13-year relationship with Woody Allen, which suffered a jolt when she found lurid photographs taken by Allen of Soon-Yi Previn, one of her adopted daughters, then a sophomore in college, on the mantel in Allen’s Manhattan apartment. Only a month earlier, in December 1991, Allen had formally adopted two of Mia’s children, 15-year-old Moses and 7-year-old Dylan, even though he was in therapy for inappropriate behavior toward Dylan. In August 1992, after disappearing with Allen in Mia’s Connecticut country house and reappearing without underpants, Dylan told her mother that Allen had stuck his finger up her vagina and kissed her all over in the attic, charges Allen has always vociferously denied. Anxious that Allen might cause her harm, Mia told me, she confessed her fears on the phone to Sinatra.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and shortly thereafter she got a call from a man who told her, “Don’t talk on the phone. Meet me at 72nd and Columbus Tuesday at 11 A.M. I’m in a gray sedan.”

“I had to be sure I understood,” Mia recalled. “I even looked up the word ‘sedan.’ ”

The car pulled up at the appointed hour; the back door flew open, and the driver motioned for her to get in. He didn’t even turn around. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

The 30-year-old biological father of the child is currently under judicial custody after he was arrested last month for allegedly killing his partner

More than a month after a 10-month-old toddler was abandoned by his father outside a cow shelter in Gandhinagar, the state child rights agency Thursday said the baby is now eligible for adoption.

According to Jagriti Pandya, chairperson of the Gujarat State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, the biological father of the toddler has given his consent for the “permanent surrender” of the custody of his child. “Since the child’s biological father is in judicial custody and not able to take care of him, he has given his consent for the permanent surrender of the child if a caring family is up for adoption. The child will now be registered on the website of the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA). There are families who have already signed up for adoption on this website and we will proceed to see if they are willing for the child’s custody,” said Pandya.

The 30-year-old biological father of the child is currently under judicial custody after he was arrested last month for allegedly killing his partner at a flat in the Bapod area of Vadodara on October 8 night and then abandoning his son outside a cow shelter in Gandhinagar the same night.

The child was found by a few pedestrians who informed the local corporator who, indeed, brought the child to a Gandhinagar civil hospital. The next day, Gujarat Minister of State (MoS) Home Harsh Sanghavi arrived at the hospital and made an appeal on social media to track the parents of the child.

Raluca Turcan found time, in her busy schedule, to participate on September 22, 2021 in the fast cutting of the inaugural ribbon of a pontoon / itinerant center for treating children with disabilities in the Danube Delta. The pontoon in question was arranged by the SERA Foundation, with money from the sponsor Penny (Rewe Group), about 120,000 euros, and from European funds. The pontoon was also included in the documents of the European-funded project "Always in the family - a project to reduce institutionalization, the risk of separation and to ensure recovery services for children in Tulcea County", a project with a total value of 5,954,979.39 lei.

SERA is one of the oldest associations / foundations operating in post-revolutionary Romania, its founder, François de Combret, being among those first Westerners who saw the potential of international adoptions. In fact, until the moratorium that stopped international adoptions, SERA was one of the main exporters of children in Romania, which was also declared by the former European official Rollie Post and supported by its head at the time, European Commissioner Günter Verheugen.

After cutting the pipeline for international adoptions, SERA struggled for a while with the system to reopen its baby faucet, then reoriented and began to get good money from the Romanian state, the EU, UNICEF, the World Bank and other institutional funders, as well as from private sponsors. This money went to projects related to child protection and social assistance, childcare centers for children with disabilities and the like, as well as many hundreds of hours of seminars and workshops.unnecessary sums, healthy salaries of employees. For example, in 2020, the net salary of the executive director of the SERA Romania Foundation was 200,200 lei per year, to which was added a small sum of 51,870 lei for the management and coordination of projects on European funds. In total, 21,000 lei per month, net. A beautiful amount, which the executive director of SERA practically doubles, with an indemnity of 21,840 lei per month, which he receives as president of the Economic and Social Council.

But who is this benefactor of the children, this good Samaritan who, in exchange for only 42,840 lei per month, takes care of the children, and of the whole council that analyzes the draft laws, decisions and ordinances?

Bogdan Simion is called the charity and has been running the SERA for many years, wandering through the good world of people who do not work for the state, but have very good connections with the state, their organizations being heavily funded with public money. Using the long-standing friendship that binds the SERA foundation to Ludovic Orban and vice versa, Bogdan Simion obtained, on December 30, 2019, the status of public utility association, through the signature of Violeta Alexandru. If he had had a little more luck, Bogdan Simion would probably have signed the granting of the status of public utility association for SERA, in 2015, when he was about to become Minister of Labor in the Ciolo? cabinet. However, he is just a poor director and a poor president of a state body, who barely takes home almost 43,000 lei a month,

{This is an abridged version of a 2021 undergrad research paper on the controversy surrounding international adoption and its history}

Examining International Adoption

Amber Moore Jimerson

When numbering the list of controversial topics today, it's unlikely many would think to include international adoption. For many, international adoption (IA) is a wholesome relief, a welcome example of the goodness of humanity in a world plagued with violence and tragedy. Not only are many unaware that IA has been in steep decline since 2008, with nearly nonexistent rates during the time of COVID, but for those who are aware of the declines it is common to view them as unjust and uncaring. Among the IA community, however, the causes for this decline are disputed, as are the controversial practices, history, and future of IA.

As the designations "pro-adoption" or "anti-adoption" are reductionistic, we will consider the general sentiments of IA "advocates" and "critics." Both seek to remedy a problem: advocates for IA see the plight of orphans and vulnerable children as the overriding issue to address, saying the benefits of adoption greatly outweigh the risks (Bartholet). Critics see the corruption, exploitation, kidnapping and fraud incentivized by the availability of IA and its unregulated profits as the primary issue, which the general public often does not realize are deeply intertwined with IA (Smolin). Critics wish to see greater emphasis on alleviating the root causes that would force families to relinquish their children, and some fear IA de-incentivizes funding for long-term solutions and community-building (King 464). As such long-term solutions are not overnight possibilities, advocates suggest IA provides a real option for those stuck between a rock and a hard place in the meantime. While advocates in various ways acknowledge the existence of corruption, critics worry they largely invalidate the pervasive nature of these dark realities, minimizing the need for reform under the guise of the "best interests of children." The United States' failure to give due diligence to these scandals and the system which empowers them has led to many shutdowns and moratoria in adoption programs among various countries (Smolin 83). This, the critics say, is what we can expect if we continue to use the "best interests" as a mask for practices which border on child trafficking. Only by fairly facing the wrongs and considering dramatic restructuring will we prevent the inevitable disfavoring and decline into nonexistence of intercountry adoption.

Senate Appropriations Committee Releases FY 2022 State and Foreign Operations (SFOPs) and Labor Health and Human Services (Labor HHS) Appropriations Bills

The Senate Appropriations Committee released its FY 2022 State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs (SFOPs) (links to bill and report) and Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor HHS) (links to bill and report) appropriations bills and accompanying reports on October 18, 2021. The SFOPs bill includes funding for U.S. global health programs at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), while the Labor HHS bill includes funding for global health programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).[i] Key highlights are as follows (see table for additional detail):

State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs (SFOPs):

Funding provided to the State Department and USAID under the SFOPs bill and through the Global Health Programs (GHP) account, which represents the bulk of global health assistance, totals $10.4 billion in the bill, $1.2 billion above the FY21 enacted level, $303 million above the President’s FY22 request, but $288 million below the FY22 House level. Funding for all global health programs at State and USAID either increased or remained flat compared to the FY21 enacted level (the largest increase is for global health security). Several program areas in the Senate bill are below House levels, including bilateral HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and family planning and reproductive health. Details on specific programs are as follows (unless otherwise specified, totals represent funding through the Global Health Programs account):

Funding for global health security totals $1 billion in the bill, which is $810 million (426%) above the FY21 enacted level ($190 million), $87 million (10%) above the FY22 Request ($913 million[ii]), and matches the FY22 House level.