President Arib of the House of Representatives intervenes at ProDemos, the Hague institute that, among other things, provides guided tours of the Binnenhof for pupils and students. There will be an independent external investigation into reports of sexual abuse by a manager.

Arib today called the board of the institute, including chairman Ed Nijpels of the Supervisory Board, to the mat. The House of Representatives and the Ministry of the Interior are the donors of ProDemos, House for Democracy. After the consultation, Arib and Minister Ollongren decided to ask Tjibbe Joustra, the outgoing chairman of the Dutch Safety Board (OVV), to lead the investigation committee.

Yesterday the NOS reported on the matter. A manager was able to persuade young employees to have sex. The victims often had a temporary contract or a zero-hour contract and were afraid to refuse. MPs reacted shocked.

Declaration yet

Yesterday, director Habben Jansen of ProDemos said that in the interest of the victims he would have preferred to treat the case confidentially. After consultation with Arib and Ollongren, he has now decided to file a complaint against the manager who has since been fired.

Having booked her dream vacation to Sri Lanka complete with an Ayurvedic retreat, Olivia Ramya Tanner (above), who grew up in a Zurich suburb, thought it might be fun to use the opportunity to find her birth mother.

This was back in April 2016. The Swiss woman who works for an IT company hired a private investigator to do some advance work. Tanner's sister, Géraldine, who's five years younger and also adopted, joined the search for her own mother.

Two days before they departed, the PI called. He had found Géraldine's mother. A reunion was arranged. He couldn't find any information on Tanner's birth mother, though, so Tanner decided to stop by Ratnapura General Hospital, where she was born, to see what she could find out.

That's when she learned her birth certificate was a fake.

"They told me I wasn't registered there and that the birth certificate wasn't even real," said Tanner. "I was numb."

Forty years ago, her overjoyed adoptive parents embraced Esther. She arrived on a KLM plane that had taken twelve other babies from Bangladesh to the Netherlands. Orphans who otherwise had no future, it was thought. The truth turns out otherwise. Esther was probably stolen from her biological parents and sold for a lot of money.

“My parents adopted me through Wereldkinderen, at the time it was called Bureau Interlandelijke Adoptie. There were only girls on my plane. I still have the photo, we came up with it in the Libelle then. My parents deliberately adopted through a reliable organization. Child Protection came to visit them, our family was fully screened. That gave them confidence that it was a reliable procedure. At the time there were stories circulating about a Flemish priest who made illegal adoption, but my parents stayed far away from that. ”

Shots next to the orphanage

When all the girls on her plane were in the Netherlands for twenty-five years, a reunion was organized. There adoption stories were exchanged. Then Esther thought it was already striking that her adoption story had a lot in common with all the other stories from the '78 plane. “The main lines were the same, but certain details were slightly different. One had been given up by an aunt, the other by an uncle and a third by the grandmother. But the situation was exactly the same. Father had died, mother died shortly afterwards, the family came from a poor rural village. The aunt, uncle or grandmother was too old and therefore gave up the child. ” Didn't Esther think: that must be a common occurrence in Bangladesh? “Yes, I did. But deep down I felt that something was wrong. I was pregnant at the time, and didn't think about it too much. But in the background it kept haunting my mind. Later we read a story from someone on the internet that the baby house I came from was a location for criminal settlements. The area next to the orphanage was a work area. Every now and then a whistle went off and the children had to go inside. Then shots rang out, and when the children came out again, all of the workers were suddenly gone. That story didn't bother me either. ” and when the children came out again, all of the workers were suddenly gone. That story didn't bother me either. " and when the children came out again, all of the workers were suddenly gone. That story didn't bother me either. ”

Lost children

A bid by one of Italy's ruling populist parties to recognise the legal rights of embryos and allow unborn children to be adopted has been denounced by critics who say it is an assault on the country's decades-old abortion law.

The proposal is back in the spotlight ahead of a global conference in Verona that seeks to defend the concept of family in society.

The World Congress of Families takes place from March 29-31 and gathers anti-LGBT, right-wing politicians and anti-abortion organisations.

The draft law was put forward by Stefano Stefani, a leading figure in the right-wing populist League party, which is currently governing in a coalition with the Five Star Movement (MS5).

Valorization of natural resources can be a decisive contributor to the improvement of the living conditions in developing countries.

Lynelle is the founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV), beginning in 1998. She is a Vietnamese adoptee residing in Australia (Sydney). She has built ICAV into an extensive worldwide network amongst the intercountry adoptee community and provided one of the first platforms worldwide for intercountry adoptee led organisations and individuals to collaborate, share, and encourage one another, regardless of sending or adoptive country.

In the first decade, Lynelle focused locally and built strong and positive relationships with the Australian Federal Government responsible for intercountry adoption (DSS & AGD) and most State Central Authorities in Australia. She also built lasting relationships with the majority of Australian NGO post adoption support organisations who provide intercountry adoption services to adoptees. This advocacy at government level in Australia, resulted in free psychological counselling to all intercountry adoptees in Australia from Relationship Matters, access to a free Hotline for all intercountry adoptees for visa, passport, birth country queries; and a free Search & Reunification Service to all intercountry adoptees via International Social Services, Australia for 2 years, which sadly, despite much advocacy, ended mid 2018 after helping over 200 adoptees and families. Today, Lynelle’s work has extended to include international networking and relationship building with other Central Authorities and organisations who work in or are connected to intercountry adoption.

Over the years, Lynelle has presented at many seminars to governments and related organisations nationally and internationally, including adoption related conferences. She has written, edited and collaborated to publish extensively on the experiences of intercountry adoptees. The book The Colour of Time was her brain child which she edited, compiled, and published in June 2017 in collaboration with ISS Australia, funded by the Australian federal government.

In 2019, Lynelle was invited to represent ICAV at The Hague Working Group to Prevent & Address Illicit Practices in Intercountry Adoption and brought together a group of leaders from around the world to contribute to this important forum. She was also guest speaker at the US Department of State Intercountry Adoption Symposium, bringing with her a group of 10 American intercountry adoptee leaders to have a say and become visible in American intercountry adoption policy & practice. Lynelle continues to elevate the intercountry adoptee voice around the world and encourages adoptee leaders to do likewise.

Lynelle has an IT and business background, having worked at large corporations, IBM and PwC. Her various roles have included managing large contracts, delivering outsourced services, sales and client management, crisis and problem management, managing high functioning IT specialist teams around the world, and bringing people together to deliver a complete IT service.

CABARATE, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC -- The world has essentially been imprisoned by a virus. Borders are closed, flights are cancelled and cities are in lockdown. Thousands of Canadians are now separated from the ones they love. These are extraordinary and uncertain times.

In my recent reporting for CTV National News, I have spoken to many families who are desperately trying to be reunited with those now trapped thousands of kilometres from home. Their fear, their sense of powerlessness, their desperation has an aching similarity to a story I have been working on for the last six months for W5.

It’s called Prisoner in Paradise and instead of a nasty virus keeping people apart, it’s the story of one Canadian family who has been separated off and on again for 10 excruciating years because of a natural disaster, changing laws and the politics of three countries.

Back in 2010 Christal and Vaden Earle launched a project in the Dominican Republic to build homes for the impoverished Haitian community. Much of their time was spent at a sprawling dump far from the all-inclusive resorts, where Haitians would try to scrap together a living by picking through the waste. It was there that the Earles met a parentless toddler named Widlene. Their attempts to adopt her have been herculean, and stymied by a series of very unfortunate events.

Her adoption paperwork was destroyed by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that wiped out entire neighbourhoods in Port au Prince, Haiti. The Dominican Republic changed laws that made Widlene stateless, a citizen of nowhere. And the Canadian government has rejected repeated legal attempts to bring her to Canada.

KARACHI:

Every month, at least one or two babies rescued from garbage dumps or the Edhi Centre’s cradles arrive at its head office near Sarrafa Bazaar in Boulton Market. But while they may have been abandoned by their biological parents, plenty of other couples are lining up to give them a home. In fact, demand far outstrips supply.

The Edhi Centre, which has earned a reputation of being the most reliable philanthropic organisation in the country, has thousands of pending adoption applications, some of which have come from abroad. Bilquis Bano Edhi, who is in charge of the adoption process, puts the number of such forms in the range of 6,000 to 7,000.

She told The Express Tribune that since they set up the centre in 1951, about 19,600 babies have been given to foster parents. But though more and more people are abandoning their babies, there are still not enough to meet adoption demands. “Most of them do not even survive the stage where they can be given for adoption as they are premature,” Bilquis Edhi pointed out.

About 80% of these unwanted babies are girls because of the persistent perception in Pakistani society that this sex is a burden. Thus, the adoption form clearly states that if you want a baby boy, you will have to wait longer.

Ayat Ahmed is a healthy toddler, just two months shy of her second birthday and learning her ABC’s with her mother in a small Dubai apartment.

But it hasn’t always been this way. Born premature and battling pneumonia, she weighed only six and a half pounds at three months old when her Canadian adoptive parents, Tauseef Qureshi and Ameera Hanif, travelled to Pakistan to become her legal guardians.

Now, 18 months later, the couple is fighting to bring Ayat home, challenging a Canadian ban on adoptions from Pakistan, while also struggling against Qureshi’s recent cancer diagnosis.

“We stand a family divided on two separate continents, living apart, not knowing when we will have the chance to see each other,” Qureshi said from his south Ottawa home.

Ottawa family struggling with infertility tries to adopt from Pakistan

As a toddler, Lalita is adopted by a Lucerne family. At the age of 39, she traveled to India for the first time. The report accompanies Livia Lalita Zgraggen's search for traces.

Author:

Christine Weber

An old man with white hair sits behind an old-fashioned reception desk. He lifts his head, his eyes behind the rimless glasses glimpse us. We say who we are and what we want. He looks a bit sullen, then shakes his head in the vague Indian way and picks up the phone. With a wave of his hand he signals to us to take a seat. We sit on a hard, cloth-covered wooden bench and wait.

It's quiet in the small room, the heat shimmers in front of the mosquito-screen windows. Somewhere a bird croaks, the hot air from the fan turns overhead. Along the wall are sacks of toys, boxes of washing powder, and other items; Presumably donations for the children here: It's 2 p.m., June 2018, and we are at St. Catherine's Home, an orphanage in a poor part of Mumbai (formerly Bombay).

DELHI, India — A West Chicago couple said they are stranded in India after picking up their adoptive daughter.

Chris and Caeli Santa Maria are anxious to get home because they have two other children waiting for them in Illinois. But the couple said it could be weeks before that happens.

The family started the adoption journey 18 months ago and 18-month-old Elli is now with them. It is something they said they always wanted to do, but never thought returning home would be so difficult.

“How are we going to get out of here? We have two kids at home,” Chris Santa Maria said. “The thought of another few weeks is hard to imagine.”

The couple arrived in Delhi, India on March 1. A seven-day lockdown followed.