A forum of mostly Catholic nuns has demanded equal treatment for priests and nuns, citing the case of a priest continuing in ministry after fathering a child with a nun who has been dismissed from her congregation.

In a letter to the top Catholic hierarchy, Sisters in Solidarity said the Church has been following a "double standard" by dismissing the nun after she became pregnant.

When priests violate the vow of celibacy, "they are merely relocated to another diocese" but when nuns face a similar situation, "they are compelled to leave their congregations," said the Dec. 16 letter titled "A wake-up call to greater integrity."

The letter was sent to Cardinal Oswald Gracias, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, Cardinal George Alencherry, major archbishop and head of the Syro-Malabar Church based in the southern state of Kerala, and other top officials.

The letter referred to Syro-Malabar Thamarassery Diocese transferring Father Jomon Kandathinkara to Shamshabad Diocese in Telangana state five years ago after diocesan officials came to know that he had fathered a baby girl with a Franciscan Clarist nun.

MAFIA expert Radu Nicolae thought he had heard it all before he sat down with convicted people traffickers in one of Romania’s toughest prisons.

But as he listened to a series of horrifying tales about parents handing over innocent children to pimps intent on selling their bodies in the UK, even he struggled to contain his disgust.

Romanian girls are bought and sold to be trafficked to the UK and forced into sex work - many are young teenagers

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Romanian girls are bought and sold to be trafficked to the UK and forced into sex work - many are young teenagersCredit: Getty Images - Getty

Lawyer, Arizona elected official and former missionary to the Marshall Islands Paul Petersen has received six years in federal prison from the state of Arkansas for arranging illegal adoptions of Marshallese babies. He still faces up to 31.5 years more in total from trials in Utah and Arizona for the same crimes. 

Timothy Banks, a federal judge in Arkansas, handed Petersen the sentence over video.

Petersen’s crime involved the illegal transport of individuals into the U.S. for private profit. There were estimated to be at least 70 cases, from which he took in over $2.7 million from adoptive parents.

Petersen claimed that he did not know what he did was illegal. However, he gave statements to government officials which he knew to be false in several states while arranging adoptions. Statements included dates of mothers’ arrivals and residencies.
 

Further discrediting the claim of ignorance is that the defendant also was a practicing attorney who was for six years the assessor for the Phoenix metro area. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the U.S.
 

For almost two decades, Helmut Sax has straddled the boundary between research and practice around anti-trafficking. He has long sat ‘on the inside’ of official international anti-trafficking bodies and yet is widely and publicly critical of the ways in which anti-trafficking efforts often fail. BTS caught up with him in the context of this twentieth anniversary debate.

Neil Howard (BTS): Helmut, you have nearly two decades of experience as both an anti-trafficker and a scholar of anti-trafficking. In this series, we’re looking at the concept of ‘exploitation’ and taking stock of where the field has gotten to in its fight against it. What’s your take on where the field is at?

Helmut Sax: The ultimate goal of anti-trafficking is not the prevention of trafficking, but the prevention of exploitation. Conceptually, trafficking should be regarded as no more than a preparatory act, something that creates or maintains situations of dependency which make people vulnerable to being exploited. The added value of making trafficking a criminal offence is precisely that it enables us to address these situations – what I call the ‘logistics’ of dependency. But doing so means working much more closely with wider efforts to end exploitation. For example, when it comes to supply chains, we shouldn’t just be focussing on monitoring but instead need to address poor working conditions, weak labour rights, and all the underlying cause factors that lead to a need for monitoring in the first place.

Neil: So why is that not happening?

Helmut: Ironically, it’s partly attributable to the fact that, as a criminal offence, trafficking is typically addressed through the criminal justice system. This leads to a heavy emphasis on investigation, arrest, and prosecution, with the obvious consequence that individual criminals are targeted instead of the exploitative circumstances in which they operate. In practice, this sees states work hard to increase their numbers of trafficking investigations and convictions, but their actual focus really should be on addressing exploitation.

FOR 40 YEARS, his name was Michael Libberton.

The Florida man defined himself by his Midwestern upbringing and the values instilled by his adoptive parents. Libberton, who was adopted shortly before his second birthday, said he thought little of the fact that he’d been born in Colombia.

Then, in 2016, Libberton applied to Lake Technical College to strengthen his welding skills. There was a problem with his paperwork. Over the next two years, Libberton followed a trail of records — from his adoptive family to the city in Illinois where he grew up to the immigration office — and learned that he was not, as he’d always believed, a U.S. citizen.

Libberton said he feels like he’s losing his country, his identity, even his name.

“You love this country, and it’s taken from you,” Libberton told USA TODAY. “Every right you thought you had, you don’t have.”

Nagpur, Dec 16 (PTI) Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh and his wife will perform the ''kanyadaan'', ritual of offering daughter''s hand to groom in marriage, of an orphan and speech and hearing impaired bride in Nagpur on Sunday.

Nagpur Collector Ravindra Thakre and his wife will will perform the father''s duty for the groom, who is also an orphan and suffers from the same disabilities, according to a release issued by the district information office.

The woman, aged 23, was found abandoned at a railway station in Nagpur 23 years back, and was adopted and raised by social worker Shankarbaba Papalkar at his orphanage in the state''s Amravati district, the release said.

The 27-year-old man was found abandoned in Dombivali town of Thane district when he was two years'' old. He was also adopted and brought up by Papalkar at his orphanage.

Their wedding will be held on December 20.

Decree of the Minister for Legal Protection of 30 November 2020, no.3114150, establishing a Committee of independent experts on the investigation of domestic distance and adoption (Decree Establishing the Committee of Independent Experts on Domestic Distance and Adoption)

The Minister for Legal Protection,

In view of Section 2, subsection 1, of the Advisory Boards and Committees Remuneration Act;

Decision:

Article 1 Definitions

Fatima walks toward the microphone and stands in front of the judge.

It’s Oct. 30, 2020, and Fatima is in the U.S. District Court in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to testify at the sentencing hearing for Michael and Charlotte Taylor.

They are her parents. Or, they were. Fatima isn’t sure what to call them anymore.

She is 19 years old, and the Taylors raised her as their daughter after adopting her from Nicaragua. This is the story she’s been told since she was 5.

Now, Fatima knows this story is a lie.

Last month, BBC Africa Eye exposed a thriving black-market trade in babies in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Police arrested seven people on trafficking charges in response to the story, but what about the women on the other side of these illegal deals? What drives a mother to sell her child?

BBC

Adama's life was easy when she had her parents, she said. Money was tight, and her options were already narrow, but there was an order to things that made sense. She attended school and cherished it. She had few worries. Then her father died when she was 12, and her mother died a few years later.

"Life became so hard then," she said, in a conversation from her village in rural western Kenya. "I had to drop out of school and fend for myself."

At 22, Adama met a man and got pregnant, but he died three days after their baby daughter was born. Her loneliness deepened. She nursed her baby through an infant sickness until the girl improved, at about 18 months, then a steady income was needed to keep them both alive. So Adama left the baby with her elderly grandmother and headed to Nairobi to find work.

When we travelled to Romania to build an orphanage 30 years ago, none of us could have been

prepared for what we witnessed, writes Anneka Rice

Anneka and Monica McDaid in a therapy room at the orphanage

uring lockdown we’ve been turning in on ourselves. It’s been

quite the thing in TV-land to take a nostalgic look at past shows