For breaking news on adoption from Vietnam and Guatemala, please see Rebecca's latest post and Lisa's, respectively.

The situations in both countries are volatile right now, and following their blogs will keep you up to date on present happenings. Don't forget to get involved in whatever ways you can, as protecting the option of adoption for the world's children is part of our job as humans on this planet.

Some European governments are beginning to lean on Nepal in efforts to encourage them to get their thumb out on processing the adoptions in the works when they suspended adoptions in March.

France, Italy and Spain all had families in the process at the time the suspension was imposed, and some 340 children have been left in the lurch in the meantime.

Turkey is looking to amend its civil code on international adoption with "the objective of facilitating the process for foreign parents."

Possible changes in the works include easing the one-year residency requirement, the rule that one parent be Turkish, and allowing non-Turkish residents to adopt.

Well-known China adoption blogger, Brian Stuy, left a comment on a post from last month called "How many orphans in China?, where he attempted to explain the numbers that had almost half a million kids without families being reduced to a mere 45,000 available for adoption.

I'm calling this a manipulation of the figures ... not by Brian, but by China ... and suggesting that all is not kosher in the realm of Chinese calculations and representations.

Lo and behold, what pops up in my browser today but this -- an excellent piece from the Washington Post about how thorough the Chinese propaganda machine is at doing its job.

The story is not about adoption, but it is about how little truth is tolerated and how important it is to the Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department that the news that's fit to print fits the ideology, no matter how dire the consequences.

Anyone suggesting that there are more potential adoptive families in the world than there are children without families is either criminally naive or lying through their teeth.


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