BOSTON - Millions of children are in need and there are thousands of willing families, but international adoptions fell again in 2018.

This is an issue we first uncovered with our reporting on State of Adoption, and the situation is only getting worse.

The number of children from other countries adopted by U.S. families dropped 13 percent to an historic low of 4,000 children.

Adoption advocates blame the U.S. State Department.

"They've put new, very restrictive policies in place that make it more difficult to advocate for children, more difficult for families, more expensive for families, and now the amount of time it takes to adopt and the children available for adoption is making it such that fewer and fewer children are finding families," Ryan Hanlon, a representative from the National Council for Adoption, said.

MADURAI: The District Child Protection Unit (DCPU) in Kanyakumari and police rescued a one-month-old girl baby after she had been given for illegal adoption by mother.

The rescue became possible due to timely information by a government doctor.

Preliminary inquiries by the DCPU staff and police revealed that the child’s mother resides in a village under the jurisdiction of the Boothapandi police station. The woman aged around 30-years-old has a 12-year-old daughter and her husband was working abroad. She developed an extramarital affair with a man in that locality, resulting in her pregnancy. This resulted in the family distancing themselves from her.

The woman’s husband refused to take care of her when she became pregnant. After the delivery, the man who was the cause of her pregnancy also refused to take care of her. She underwent check-up in the government primary health centre (PHC) where the doctor came to know of her background and alerted the DCPU. DCPU officials gave her counselling and asked her to give her baby for legal adoption if she could not raise it.

On January 19, 2019, the woman gave birth to the baby in the Asaripallam Government Medical College and Hospital in Nagercoil. DCPU officials conducted follow-up checks on January 20 and 28 and found the baby in the possession her mother. On February 21, the PHC staff went to her house on a field visit and found that the baby was not with the mother. This was brought to the notice of the DCPU.

Special Advisor for Children’s Issues Suzanne Lawrence hails ‘good relationship’ with Argentine authorities during visit to Buenos Aires.

Last year, in the 2018 Annual Report on International Child Abduction, pub l i s h e d b y U S S t a t e Depar tment’s Office of Children’s Issues, Argentina was listed as a country demonstrating a pattern of noncompliance with international protocol.

According to the study, Argentina failed to adhere to the International Parental Child Abduction (IPCA) Convention, a treaty that falls under The Hague Convention, a private international law instrument. Both the United States and Argentina are signatories to it, as well as 100 other countries worldwide.

The topic was on the agenda for Suzanne Lawrence, the Special Advisor for Children’s Issues for the US State Department, as she visited Argentina this week. The US official met with national authorities in Buenos Aires to discuss issues relating to international child abduction, as well as to intercountry adoption.

According to the2018 report, published last April by Lawrence’s department, there were five child abduction cases in total, involving six children, between the two nations in 2017. Three were continuations of incidents from the year prior. By the end of the year, two cases were resolved and none were closed.

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear after two weeks a fresh plea alleging that CBI tried to "shield the real perpetrators" in the

Muzaffarpur shelter home case by not conducting proper probe on "crucial leads" which are available on record. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home at Muzaffarpur in Bihar and the issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

The probe into the case was transferred to CBI and the agency has chargesheeted 21 people, including prime accused Brajesh Thakur. The fresh application was mentioned on Thursday for urgent hearing before a bench of justices S A Bobde and S A Nazeer which said the matter would be heard

after two weeks. The plea, filed through advocate Fauzia Shakil, has sought a direction to the CBI to carry out a thorough, proper and scientific probe into the case.

"It is evident from the statement of victims that a large scale prostitution racket was being run by prime accused Brajesh Thakur. "From the perusal of the charge sheet, it is apparent that CBI is trying to shield the real perpetrators and has intentionally avoided to investigate the leads given by the victims about the outsiders and alleged friends of Thakur who were involved in the offence," the plea said.

Dhaka: Bangladesh's former prime minister Khaleda Zia on Monday challenged the 10-year sentence handed out to her for embezzling funds meant for an orphanage trust in her late husband's name, claiming that she has been convicted in a "fabricated" case. A bail petition was also submitted alongside the petition seeking stay order of the jail term, reported bdnews24. On February 8, Dhaka Special Court convicted the former premier in the Zia Orphanage Trust graft case and sentenced her to five years of imprisonment for embezzling 21 million Bangladeshi Taka (USD 252,504) in foreign donations meant for the Trust. Five others accused - including her son and BNP senior vice-chairman Tarique Rahman - received 10 years' imprisonment each.

On October 30, the High Court doubled the jail term of Zia to 10 years. "Usually a sentence is reduced on appeal. But in Khaleda Zia's case, it was increased. This is completely motivated by politics," the former premier's lawyer Kaysar Kamal was quoted as saying by the report.

The BNP chairperson has been "sentenced in a false, fabricated and fake case, he added.

The petition to stay the verdict in the Zia Orphanage Trust graft case was filed a day after she challenged the trial court's verdict in the Zia Charitable Trust graft case in which she was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined Tk 1 million (USD 12,024). Zia, 73, has been in custody since February 8, when she was handed jail term in the case related to embezzlement of funds in the orphanage trust named after her husband late president Ziaur Rahman.

Zia was made vice-chairperson of the BNP in March 1983 after the assassination of her husband. She became chairperson of the party on May 10, 1984, a post she is holding till now. In her 35 years of political career, Zia went to the jail several times. During the 2007-2008 tenure of the army-backed caretaker government, she was in jail for about a year on charges of corruption.

CHENNAI: The Australian federal government recently said ‘orphanage tourism’ was modern slavery and a scam, making it clear that they will cut off support to overseas orphanages from Australian schools an universities after concerns of exploitation and abuse surfaced. The move was lauded by Tamil Nadu child rights activists, who for long have been crying foul over the surreptitious association of foreign tourists with some orphanages here. They have demanded that authorities impose a total ban on foreigners and volunteers visiting these facilities because the present rules to monitor and check interaction of foreigners with children in homes are ignored. The few cases of abuse that are reported are an fraction of the problem, say activists, as without stringent laws and its proper execution it is difficult to pin down the violators.

For foreigners to visit orphanages, now called childcare institutions, they must get a volunteer visa and a volunteer certificate from their country. But, senior officials at the social defence department too said they rarely receive such applications from foreign volunteers. Apart from this it is mandatory for the children’s home to submit an application with the directorate of social defence and district child protection unit, who conduct a background check of the volunteer. "These procedures are hardly followed. Many times management of the home hides such dealings," said G Renuka, child rights activist and former member of the Kancheepuram Child Welfare Committee.

Collector of Thiruvannamalai K S Kandasamy said, "We have noticed that a majority of orphanages are run as businesses, sustained by well-intentioned foreigners who donate and spend time with children at the campus. This also makes the children more vulnerable," he said. Kandasamy recalled a recent incident where a girl was allegedly taken to a foreign donor’s place late in the night. "We got a tip but by the time we reached, the child was brought back and refused to answer," he said. Last year, the CWC had fined an NGO for allowing a group of foreign volunteers to stay at an orphanage in Kancheepuram. "Those who visit from within the country must also fall under this ambit. The danger is from all ends," said Andal Damodaran president of the Indian Council for Child Welfare (Tamil Nadu).

Experts say there is no check now to prevent sex offenders who choose professions which give them access and proximity to children through institutions.

According to a recent report by the ministry of women and child development, TN has 1,647 registered childcare institutions housing more than 87,000 children. It also showed that children living in at least 600 of these homes were mistreated. "We must focus on providing alternative care such as sponsorship, fostercare and adoption. Institutionalization must be the last resort," said Sugata Roy, Unicef communication specialist.

Garage sales are not unusual in Western Branch. However, Caroline and Kirk Kalmbacher are seeking to shrink the contents of their home to grow their family.

The Kalmbachers have organized a garage, yard, and pop-up bake sale on March 30 and March 31 to raise the money to adopt a child, ideally two, from India.

They set their hearts on adopting a child from India in 2017 and have been going through the complicated and costly adoption process for almost a year.

Kirk Kalmbacher works for the U.S. Coast Guard in Yorktown. He found out about Indian adoptions from a colleague who went through the process.

“We had thought about China and many other countries," Caroline Kalmbacher said. "We had never thought of India."

'My birth mother deserves an apology': Forced to give her up for adoption, Liz Wilde's mum Valerie was told it would spell the end of her status as a 'fallen woman'

Forced to give her up for adoption, Liz Wilde’s mother Valerie was told it would spell the end of her troubles as a ‘fallen woman’. But decades later, Liz would discover it was just the beginning of a lifetime of heartbreak

My birth mother Valerie was never meant to see me cradled in my adoptive mother’s arms.

This was very much against protocol.

As agreed, at 2pm on Wednesday 26 February 1964, she had brought me to the London offices of the National Children Adoption Association to meet my new parents. I was dressed immaculately in one of the many outfits she had knitted for me. ‘We could tell that you were loved,’ a friend of my adoptive mother told me many years later.

MEPs call for action as openDemocracy analysis reveals ‘shocking’ flows of cash crossing the Atlantic to push ultra-conservative agendas.

US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the last decade, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.

They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined”, according to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who have called our findings “shocking”. Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, a cross-party group of more than 40 MEPs has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans to look into the influence of “US Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European Parliament elections.

Among the biggest spenders is a group whose chief counsel is also Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow. Another organisation has collaborated with a controversial Rome-based ‘institute’ backed by Steve Bannon. And a number of the groups are connected to the World Congress of Families: a network of ultra-conservative activists which has links to far-right politicians and movements in several European countries, including Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Serbia.

A report has found that right-wing non-profits in the US have ramped up spending on lobbying and campaigns in Europe. It comes amid fears that far-right parties could make big gains in European elections this May.

Right-wing Christian groups in the United States spent at least $50 million (€56 million) on supporting far-right activists and campaigns in Europe in recent years, according to an investigative report.

Publicly available financial filings showed 15 conservative non-profit organizations spent some $51 million in Europe from 2008 to 2017, the report by UK-based openDemocracy found.

The filings did not detail what the money was spent on, but openDemocracy said the groups used it to:

lobby European Union officials