Continued from here ...

Another Free Trade Union leader was murdered this week ... the third since 2004.

Chea Mony, current FTU president of Cambodia, said that the killing was an attempt to intimidate union members.

"The killing is to frighten FTU members from striking or staging demonstrations against... more

Starting off, here's a fascinating story of what happened after Cambodian tribes emerged from the jungle years after vanishing into the bush in efforts to escape Vietnamese soldiers twenty-five years ago. Lied to by the Khmer Rouge, terrified of the Vietnamese, these people were welcomed back into the fold when they first appeared, but found themselves soon forgotten.

The office of... more

Continued from here ... And while we're talking about the bottom perhaps falling out of Guatemalan adoptions, how about the bottom just falling out completely?

A 330-foot-deep sinkhole killed two teenage siblings when it swallowed about a dozen homes early Friday and forced the evacuation of nearly 1,000 people in a crowded Guatemala City neighborhood.

Officials... more

As I wrote a while back, there's a new mess boiling with Guatemalan adoptions at the moment, and the fallout is forming the toxic atmosphere it's renown for. Not unexpectedly, the US Government is well into it now.

Here is what the State Department has issued:

In light of a number of problems... more

Continued from here:

On the money front ... China is going to build some massive power plants in Cambodia. One in Battambang alone will cost $190 million and is expected to generate 465 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.

And a number of articles on Cambodian oil are worth a read. ... more

Cambodia had quite a bit of coverage this week, and much of it is not just news, but some fascinating stories, as well.

A while back I wrote about Sythan Leam a fourteen-year-old Cambodian girl who has been suffering the effects of a horrendous burn in infancy that make it impossible for her to walk. She's now in Hawaii and preparing to undergo surgery.

Yesterday... more

I am disgusted with the Toronto Star this morning. (OT tangent warning ... What an age we live in! Here I am, sitting at my desk on an island in the Indian Ocean, about to write about being ticked off over something I've seen in a Canadian newspaper, and sharing my irritation with you ... you being almost exclusively a person half the world away from the aforementioned desk. Cool ... )

I wrote yesterday about... more

In what appears to be reaction to focus on female infanticide in India, the government has announced that it will be building orphanages for the excess of unwanted baby girls.

Dubbed the "cradle scheme," the plan is an attempt to slow the practice that international groups say has killed more than 10 million female fetuses in the last two decades, leading to an alarming imbalance in the ratio between males and females... more

There's adoption-related international news from all over, so here's some of it ...

Last week saw "Adoption Consciousness Week" observed in Philippines, and Holt International worked with the Department of Social Welfare's InterCountry Adoption Board in getting information out and about.

Hopefully, the Philippines will realize the need to immediately provide nurturing families for starving children rather than allowing their delayed development and consequential retardation in horrifying orphanages, hazardous streets and contaminating prisons. As of the... more

The story of Guatemalan adoption facilitator Mary Bridgett Bonn is sloshing around groups, forums and blogs like crazy right now, and like the Lauren Galindo fiasco in the Cambodian adoption mess, there's no shortage of view point and opinion. I'm in no way comparing Bonn and Galindo, simply the hoopla attached, but do worry ... greatly ... that the fallout... more