Time to clean up the desk again, so today' s post will be bits and pieces of news I've been collecting to pass along, starting with an announcement from Ethica about an up-coming conference, co-sponsored by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, to be held in Washington DC in October. The topic is "Adoption Ethics and Accountability". For more info, see Ethica's conference registration page.

The French government has reopened adoptions from Cambodia. Starting out slowly, thirty Cambodian children will be allowed to become members of French families in 2007.

The reopening of Viet Nam to French families in March precipitated the filing of more than 1,500 submissions to adopt within the first ten days, and I'm sure this will generate as much interest, at least.

Cambodia and Viet Nam may be opening to the French, but Nepal has been closed since January.

The only applications that will be processed from now on are those received from an intermediary adoption agency approved for Nepal by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and accredited by the authorities of that country.

And as of last week, Nepal itself is suspending adoptions of Nepali children pending "approval of reforms of the adoption process by the Nepali cabinet." No indication has been given about how long this will be in place.

A look at international adoptions in Spain shows that half are of children from China.

After the Chinese, Russian children were the next most popular nationality with 302 registered adoptions over the past three years, ahead of 134 Ukrainians, 121 Colombians and 42 Bulgarians with Latin American and African nationalities accounting for a minuscule share of the total.

An interesting case of relative adoption the hard way made the news recently. An Australian half-sister to a special needs birth mother in England wanted to avoid her new twin nephews going into the foster care system in the UK, but had a heck of a time adopting. According to the report, this was the first case of British children being adopted internationally, and it seems the authorities there were none too chuffed. It's an interesting read.

And while we're on the UK, this story from Slough talks about an unexplained influx of "Gypsy orphans" who have "besieged" the town ... ninety of them, apparently. Anti-Romany sentiment is strong in England, so this is not likely to end well.

For more news, see the next post.