I decided early this morning that today's post would be a catch-up on bits of adoption news floating around my desk. When I learned that another power cut was in the cards for a better part of the day, that settled it. Writing anything deeper without the ability to bounce around the Net researching isn't how I like to work, so a good little tidy sounded even better ... my blogging equivalent to some light dusting.

Little did I know I'd end up in tears.

As is far too often really obvious, adoptive parents get a lot... more

Whether you're considering international adoption, in the process, or have already adopted, global issues of adoption may be ... should be ... of even greater interest and concern than for the regular man-on-the-street without direct connections. Our children do not appear out of a vacuum, but become available for adoption through circumstances that vary widely, but often have similar themes. Poverty, war, disease, starvation, upheaval, death ... all make their dark mark and destroy lives and hopes and dreams and options. How organizations funded... more

Holly's Africa Adopt Blog on GW Bush's announced call for a bump in the HIV/AIDS budget ties into research I've been doing lately on a variety of issues relating to the world's children and provides a smooth lead to related stories in the news right now.

Global Action For Children,(GAC), the... more

Here's the question that started me off down a thought highway ... if an adopted child is proven to have been kidnapped and the biological family is found, what should happen to that child?

Talk on web groups in response to the story out of Holland about the adopted child proven to have been kidnapped in India... more

We began this series of posts with our attention on kidnapping ... the Maddy McCann case, and the adopted child... more

"Cultural genocide" is a term that gets tossed around the international adoption world like a hacky-sack, often with little regard for what culture actually is, but loving the impact the word 'genocide' imparts.

We know genocide,... more

There are no few people in and around the international adoption world who feel that corruption in birth countries is so pervasive that adoptions originating in those countries can be nothing but tainted. Many would prefer that adoptions from such places stop until transparent systems can be put in place that would assure total transparency.

There... more

Corruption in the international adoption realm put the brakes on Cambodian adoptions more than six years ago. One person was sent to prison over this, an American woman named Lauren Galindo, and I think I'd be fair in saying this most likely didn't upset corrupt Cambodian officials one little bit.

Banning adoptions hasn't bothered them much either, or at least not enough to pass the anti-corruption legislation other countries... more

How much money and how many lives are lost each year to corruption in governments can only be guessed, but it has to be assumed to massive ... and pervasive. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, it's here, it's there, it's everywhere, and doing some level of damage to everything it touches.

Corruption put a halt to adoption in Cambodia in 2001 and is widely implicated as an integral aspect of almost all ... more

The UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) released a report a few days ago on unsatisfactory conditions in orphanages in Liberia. Again. Sheesh! April must be their "trash Liberian adoption month". I wrote about the same darned thing this time last year!

Apparently,... more