The largest circulation newspaper in New Jersey is calling on state legislators to reject a bill to open sealed adoption records. The Star Ledger takes issue with most of the arguments that the bill's backers have used to advance it, from adoptee rights to the need for medical histories. "Changing the law retroactively," it concludes, "is just plain wrong". The bill (S611) passed the New Jersey Senate earlier this week and now goes to the state's Assembly. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has written an editorial against a similar bill pending in Minnesota.

New Jersey's attorney general has issued a warning that the family leave bill passed by the state's Senate earlier this week could make business owners vulnerable to lawsuits. The bill (S786), which would allow parents in the state to take time off after an adoption, may have to undergo revisions before it goes to the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Monday.

China's Xinhua news service is reporting that inter-country adoptions of Cambodian children fell 15% from 2006 to 2007. Working off a story in the Cambodian Daily, Xinhua reported that 249 Cambodian children were adopted by foreigners last year, down from 294 for 2006. Italian parents adopted the majority of the children--164-while the rest went to Austria and France. The report also quoted an official at Cambodia's Ministry of Social Affairs as saying that the country needed to increase the number of domestic adoptions.

The Agence France Presse news service is reporting that 103 African children at the center of an adoption scandal involving a French charity will be going home to their families. Six officials at the French group, known as Zoe's Ark, were sentenced in December to eight years hard labor for trying to take the children out of Chad last October while claiming they were Darfur refugees.

Abandoned children are at the top of the news in Toronto and New York City. A girl, believed to be about nine months old, was abandoned in a Toronto stairwell on January 30. According to the Toronto Star, it will be at least one more month before the child, who was dubbed Angelica Leslie by child welfare workers, will be eligible for adoption. One hundred families filed to adopt the girl, but Canada's Children's Aid Society has narrowed the applicants to five.

New York's story, meanwhile, has more twists that a mountain road. Early this week, a livery cab driver brought a baby to a firehouse saying she had been left in the back of his cab. Within days, police had determined that the cab driver's girlfriend was the baby's aunt and that the baby's mother was just 14. According to a local newspaper, the baby has since been reunited with her mother. The cab driver, who faces a charge of criminal facilitation, has told investigators that he was trying to act under New York state's "Safe Haven" law. That law lets birth mothers leave a newborn at a hospital, firehouse or police station.

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