International

Some friends of ours from church were mentioned in the local paper in a story about a group of adoptions that were finalized last week, including that of their 15-month-old daughter Marilena. From an article of the same title in The Midland Daily News by Kelly Nankervis:

"We believe our family was put together by God," said Fred Sitter, before Marilena's adoption was finalized. She is the second child Sitter and his wife, Connie, have adopted; David, age 5, is from Mexico. Marilena is from Guatemala. "This is what was meant to be," Fred said of how the family came to be.

Fred spoke in church a month or two ago about their experiences during the adoption process and about the metaphor of adoption into the family of God. On a related note via Today's Papers, recently there was an article in the NY Times by Marc Lacey titled "Guatemalan Adoption System Under Scrutiny":

Guatemala, where nearly one in every 100 children is adopted by an American family, ranks third behind much larger nations, China and Russia, when it comes to providing babies to American couples. The pace of adoptions and the fact that mothers here, unlike in other places, are sometimes paid for their babies have brought increasing concern and the prospect of new regulation that may significantly reduce the number of Guatemalan babies bound for the United States next year, or end it altogether. Critics of the adoption system here - privately run and uniquely streamlined - say it has turned this country of 12 million people into a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as if they were a commodity. The United States is the No. 1 destination.

In other countries, adoptive parents are sought out for abandoned children. In Guatemala, children are frequently sought out for foreign parents seeking to adopt and given up by their birth mothers to baby brokers who may pay from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a baby, according to interviews with mothers and experts.

From an article of the same title on BBCNews.com:

Nearly 60% of Ethiopian women were subjected to sexual violence, including marital rape, according to the Ending Violence Against Women report. Almost half of all Zambian women said they had been attacked by a partner... In addition to violence from partners, the report also condemned what it found to be high levels of institutionalised violence, such as female genital mutilation, estimating that 130 million girls and women had undergone this practice.

From an article of the same title by Michael Luo in the NY Times:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 16 - The blackened shells of five cars still sit in front of the Church of the Virgin Mary here, stark reminders of a bomb blast that killed two people after a recent Sunday Mass. In the northern city of Mosul, a priest from the Syriac Orthodox Church was kidnapped last week. His church complied with his captors' demands and put up posters denouncing recent comments made by the pope about Islam, but he was killed anyway. The police found his beheaded body on Wednesday... Christianity took root here near the dawn of the faith 2,000 years ago, making Iraq home to one of the world's oldest Christian communities. The country is rich in biblical significance: scholars believe the Garden of Eden described in Genesis was in Iraq; Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, a city in Iraq; the city of Nineveh that the prophet Jonah visited after being spit out by a giant fish was in Iraq. Both Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians, the country's largest Christian sects, still pray in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. They have long been a tiny minority amid a sea of Islamic faith. But under Saddam Hussein, Iraq's million or so Christians for the most part coexisted peacefully with Muslims, both the dominant Sunnis and the majority Shiites. But since Mr. Hussein's ouster, their status here has become increasingly uncertain, first because many Muslim Iraqis framed the American-led invasion as a modern crusade against Islam, and second because Christians traditionally run the country's liquor stories, anathema to many religious Muslims. Over the past three and a half years, Christians have been subjected to a steady stream of church bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and threatening letters slipped under their doors. Estimates of the resulting Christian exodus vary from the tens of thousands to more than 100,000, with most heading for Syria, Jordan and Turkey.

From an article of the same title on BBCNews.com:

A Japanese woman in her 50s gave birth to her own grandchild last year, using an egg from her daughter and sperm from her son-in-law, a doctor has revealed. It was the first time a woman has acted as a surrogate mother for her daughter in Japan, local media reported. The case is set to stir debate in Japan where surrogate births are opposed by the government and a key medical group. Japan's justice ministry also views the woman who gives birth as a child's mother - not the biological mother… She had agreed to in vitro fertilisation and to act as a surrogate mother because her daughter had had her uterus removed due to cancer and was therefore unable to bear children. Both the mother and child were reported to be in good health… Surrogate births involve removing an egg to be fertilised and then implanting it in another woman who carries the baby to birth.

From an article of the same title by Molly Moore in The Washington Post:

When Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega graduated from law school in the 1970s, Spanish law prohibited her -- and any other woman -- from becoming a judge, serving as a witness in court or opening a bank account. Today, the angular, outspoken 57-year-old is Spain's first female vice president, helping orchestrate a cultural revolution in the boardrooms and living rooms of the country that coined the word machismo -- male chauvinism -- five centuries ago… Her Socialist government is requiring political parties to allot 40 percent of their candidate lists to women and is telling big companies to give women 40 percent of the seats on corporate boards. Half of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero's cabinet members are women -- the highest proportion in any government in Europe. New divorce laws not only make it easier for couples to split but stipulate that marital obligations require men to share the housework equally with their wives.