Uganda getting pushed to become next “Hot adoption” Supply country

As international adoptions have flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past 15 years — places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Romania — have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping. And yet when a country is closed due to corruption, many adoption agencies simply transfer their clients’ hopes to the next “hot” country. That country abruptly experiences a spike in infants and toddlers adopted overseas — until it too is forced to shut its doors.

Source: Foreign Policy

• The requirements that adoptive parents must live in Uganda for three years and foster the child for the same sum of time have been taken away

• Holt International (founding behemoth of all Western adoption agencies) announced a pilot program

• Mainstream liberal outlets hand-wringing/salivating over Uganda’s birthrate, which is ranked second highest in the world

• KONY 2012 DIDN’T HELP ANY

(But seriously, fuck you Jason Russell & co. - yet another case study of White Savior Industrial Complex doing more harm than good in unforeseen ways that are denied recognition even once they’re in sight)

LOATHING EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW

Blind Human Rights Activist Chen Guangcheng Evades Over 90 Guards and Escapes Through 8 Security Checkpoints

The blind Chinese rights activist, Chen Guangcheng has made a daring escape from his captors and put out a video exposing the abuse and beatings that his family suffered under house arrest.

Evading almost 100 guards who have surrounded his village home for more than a year, Chen is said to have found refuge in a “safe” location in Beijing.

Chen is one of China’s best known activists who exposed abuses under China’s one child policy, including thousands of forced abortions and sterilisations. Human rights campaigners expressed delight that Chen – whose protracted, illegal detention has drawn international attention – is no longer in the hands of the authorities[…]

Chen is believed to have used the cover of darkness in which his blindness – he lost his sight at the age of five – gave him an advantage over his captors.

It is not yet clear how Chen evaded the officials, police and plainclothes thugs who have been permanently camped in and around his home in Linyi since his release from prison in 2010. [It’s believed he scaled a high wall.] But activists said it was not an individual, opportunistic bid for freedom.

“This wasn’t a sudden thing. In order to escape from a place with so many guards must have taken a great deal of planning,” said Phelim Kine of Human Rights Watch.

Sources: The Guardian and Radio Australia

…

UM, #Professional BADASS.

(Source: brandx)

Breast cancer survivor handcuffed and thrown in jail over a mistaken $280 medical bill as ‘debtor’s prisons’ return to the U.S

How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn’t pay a medical bill — one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn’t owe.

“She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn’t have to pay it,” The Associated Press reports. “But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs.”

Although the U.S. abolished debtors’ prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don’t pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff’s deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.

A 2010 report by the American Civil Liberties Union that focused on only five states — Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington — found that people were being jailed at “increasingly alarming rates” over legal debts. Cases ranged from a woman who was arrested four separate times for failing to pay $251 in fines and court costs related to a fourth-degree misdemeanor conviction, to a mentally ill juvenile jailed by a judge over a previous conviction for stealing school supplies.

The Return of Debtors’ Prisons: THOUSANDS of Americans Jailed For Not Paying Bills (via ThinkProgress.org)

(Source: brandx)