John Tufts says he’s innocent of the horrific child abuse crime that landed him in the Denton County Jail in October 2016. He spoke to the Dallas Observer while standing in front of the courthouse Monday morning, where he was to appear in Judge Brody Shanklin’s 211th District Court.

Tufts’ 5-year-old adopted daughter, who came from Poland, claimed a bad guy “hurt my vagina and booty and they make it red” but refused to identify him, according to Tufts’ arrest warrant affidavit.

Instead, she simply told the therapist her attacker was a monster and “I don’t want to talk about the bad guy.”

“She never said I was the monster,” Tufts says. “She said the guy in Poland did it to her.”

The Child Advocacy Resources and Evaluation Team at Cook Children’s Hospital investigated and determined that the child had been abused in the United States and was at risk for more abuse if she returned to home. Police charged Tufts with injury to a child — serious bodily injury, a second-degree felony, claiming in the affidavit that he “intentionally and knowingly caused injury to [the child] by inserting a Barbie doll into her vaginal and anal area.” Tufts’ wife, Georgiana, who is now estranged, was also charged with the felony crime.

A sweet little boy, with stars in his eyes when he smiled. This is how a grieving mother describes her son Delias (2.5) in the Alkmaar court. Placed with foster parents, he died in April 2020 from severe head injuries. According to the Public Prosecution Service (OM), his foster mother brutally abused him. "You literally beat the life out of my child."

Two broken women faced each other in the court of Alkmaar on Tuesday. On the left is Delias' mother, who is crying about the big hole in her broken family. Right in front of her in the suspect's bench is the 47-year-old DR, a mother who may have to explain to her own child that mom has to go to prison for a long time.

When Delias was just in his mother's womb, there were doubts whether the family was ready for a third child. "When I knew it, I had to swallow hard. I have a troubled past and was already struggling to get by with two children," she explains.

Until she had a dream that made her know she was going to make it. "I dreamed about a turtle, which I picked up and then put back in a stream. He went forward with the current. For me a spiritual sign to go with the flow."

Signs of God

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The adoptive parents of two small California boys who were reported missing in 2020 have been charged with killing the children, although their bodies have not been found, authorities said Wednesday.

Trezell West and Jacqueline West were arrested Tuesday night on murder and other charges in an indictment returned by a grand jury, Kern County District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer told a news conference in Bakersfield.

Orrin West, 4, and his brother Orson, 3, were reported missing from their family’s backyard in the desert town of California City on Dec. 21, 2020. A huge search by law enforcement agencies and community members failed to find them.

“This morning, I’m saddened to announce that the investigation has revealed that Orrin and Orson West are deceased,” Zimmer said. “The investigation has also revealed that they died three months before their adoptive parents reported them missing.”

The district attorney said she was not permitted to reveal any facts of the case until the trial.

KYIV, March 16 (Reuters) - Ukrainian nurse Oksana Martynenko and her colleagues have 21 babies to look after at a makeshift clinic in a residential basement on the outskirts of Kyiv - all of them surrogates whose parents cannot come to collect them because of the war.

All the while she has her own family to worry about. Her children are in the region around Sumy, a city some 200 miles (320 km) east of the capital which has been bombarded by Russian forces.

It is too dangerous for Martynenko to try to reach them, so they are living with their grandmother.

"We haven't been able to get home since Feb. 24," she told Reuters on Tuesday, as she changed one of the baby's diapers.

"I am from Sumy region, but I cannot go there. I have children at home ... They (the Russians) started to bombard our town yesterday. We wait for news every day about what is happening there ... But we cannot leave these babies."

CHENNAI: A 64-year-old man and his three sons have been booked for

sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl the man had adopted when she was

1-month-old, police said. The girl had been undergoing torture for the past

two years.

While the all-women police arrested the foster father, his two sons, and

A couple and their two sons were arrested in Chennai for reportedly sexually abusing their adopted 17-year-old daughter. A third son has also been booked, but he is absconding. The daughter had reported the abuse to her step-mother but the woman had ignored her.

Chennai Police arrested a man, his wife and their two sons on Tuesday, April 5, for sexually abusing their adopted 17-year-old daughter. Police have booked a third son in the case too, but he is absconding, according to a report by the Times of India.

The minor girl had been undergoing torture for the last two years, and even though she revealed the ordeal to her foster mother, the woman had ignored it. The foster father runs a lorry repair shed. His two sons are lorry and car drivers, and the third son runs a mobile phone service centre, said police.

The 17-year-old, who is now a college student, was adopted back in 2005 by the man and his wife as they did not have a daughter. Her biological parents had given her away as she was the youngest of four children and they struggled to raise all of them.

The survivor had met her biological siblings at a wedding four months ago. Later, she revealed to one of her brothers about the torture she was going through at her foster parents’ home. She had left her foster parents' house fearing they might harm her.

Braunschweig - Riot in the venerable Braunschweig Cathedral (built in 1173). Cantor Gerd-Peter Münden (55) ran the largest Protestant singing school in Germany there and sang with hundreds of children every week.

But now he was fired without notice after 23 years!

Because it degrades women and children to commodities and damages their human dignity. This is what cathedral preacher Cornelia Götz writes in an e-mail to 600 schoolchildren's parents (is available to BILD am SONNTAG). The cantor vehemently disagrees.

What happened? Gerd-Peter Münden has been cathedral cantor since 1999 and married the Colombian Esteban Builes-Münden (33) in 2020. Both want to start a family, have a child carried by two surrogate mothers in the Colombian capital Bogotá and bring them to Germany.

The cantor told his colleagues about this and applied for leave in early 2022 so that he could fly to Colombia. The cathedral preacher then wrote her angry email, arguing that surrogacy makes women “a pure means of their own desire to have children” and exploits their weak position in an emerging country.

Gabriel “Tokkie” du Preez, the adopted son of Die Antwoord’s Yolandi Visser (aka Anri du Toit) and Ninja (aka Watkin Jones), has accused the couple of physical and sexual abuse and exploitation. The allegations surfaced through a 44-minute interview with the South African group’s former filmmaker Ben Jay Crossman and a subsequent sitdown with News24.

du Preez and his younger sister were adopted by Die Antwoord in 2010 — when he was just nine years old — under foster parenting agreements with their biological mother. They would go on to appear in music videos like “I Fink U Freeky” and “Ugly Boy” while being raised with du Toit and Jones’ biological daughter and a boy from another poor family in Johannesburg.

“They adopted me to be a slave,” he recalled about the experience. “They made me feel like I wasn’t really being loved.” Now 20, he is back in his childhood home, while his 14-year-old sister no longer lives with du Toit and Jones as well.

He told News24 that the abuse and exploitation began when he was allegedly forced to record videos degrading his biological family for being poor. According to du Preez, who suffers from a rare skin disease called hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, they made him feel like he was the devil.

“They made me swear more and made me believe that I could burn people in hell and that I am the king of hell,” he said. “They told me that I could bring darkness upon the world.”

At 9 months old, baby Getahun was described as happy, active, and laidback. He had been adopted the month before from Ethiopia, by Kyle Wohlers and Matthew Willis, a couple living in western Washington state.

“He enjoys looking at brightly colored objects and just watching what is going on around him,” wrote a caseworker with Bethany Christian Services in an adoption follow-up report in 2010.

Now 13 years old, Getahun, identified here by his middle name to protect his identity, was small. At 16 pounds, he was in the 1st percentile for weight when he arrived in the U.S. His weight fluctuated over the years, but remained low by American standards.

Getahun’s adoptive parents initially attributed his low weight to malnourishment as an infant in Ethiopia. Later, they cited an unspecified eating disorder borne from neglect he’d experienced prior to being adopted.

That explanation didn’t sit right with people in their small community on Lopez Island, who reported noticing that Getahun and his adoptive parents did not connect with each other. Was Getahun's state the result of long-term trauma from being an orphan, they wondered, or was something else going on?

The Weekend Australian recently featured on its front page a story about the journey Canberra couple Emma and Alex Micallef have undergone to commission a baby in Ukraine. It detailed the obstacles they have experienced along the way, including the logistics of managing such an arrangement in the midst of the country’s ongoing invasion at the hands of Russia (“Miracle of life delivered in a war-torn land far away”).

However, what is interesting to note about the story (and not mentioned in the newspaper article) is that entering into an overseas commercial surrogacy arrangement is illegal in the Australian Capital Territory, the jurisdiction where the couple currently reside. According to the Australian government’s smart traveller website:

“It is illegal for residents of the ACT, NSW and QLD to enter into commercial surrogacy arrangements overseas. Doing so could lead to arrest and jail in Australia.”

The process as described in the news article indicates that the Micallefs, with the assistance of non-profit organisation Growing Families, have entered into a commercial surrogacy arrangement overseas:

“The commercialisation of the process – very different from the altruistic approach in Australia – meant the baby would be legally the Micallefs’ from birth and they would not have to go through bureaucratic processes to adopt their daughter. There is no court decree, no adoption procedure, and the gestational mother, who is paid about €15,000 to €20,000 ($22,200 to $29,640), which is many times the Ukrainian minimum wage, has no legal right.”