>I think the president's ice cream cone is melting
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/nigeria-seizes-donkey-penises-smuggled-hong-kong-89519009
Nigeria seizes donkey penises to be smuggled to Hong Kong
Nigerian officials say they have seized thousands of donkey penises that were about to be exported to Hong Kong
ABUJA, Nigeria – Nigerian officials have seized thousands of donkey penises that were about to be exported to Hong Kong, an official said on Thursday.
Sacks of the donkey male genitals were seized at the international airport in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, Sambo Dangaladima, the Nigeria Customs Service area commander, told reporters.
The consignment was “falsely declared … as cow male genitals (but) after due examination, my export officers discovered they were donkey male genitals,” said Dangaladima. A total of 16 sacks of the genitals were seized, he said.
We go back a long way. She was 12, I was 30.
>The global Ice Cream Cones market
>Dough
yes
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-18/unicef-looks-to-track-26000-orphans-in-ukraine-war-russia/101431462
Ukrainian authorities released nearly 100,000 children from institutional care. Now UNICEF is trying to find 26,000 of them
At the Odesa Orphanage-Boarding School four months after Russia invaded Ukraine, an air raid alarm sent nurses in white coats hurrying residents into a basement beneath the kitchen.
Among them was Tanya, a slight 12-year-old who favours a pink sun hat.
On June 15, Tanya, who has autism and is non-verbal, was moved from the institution, her home of four years, following an order from the local government in March to evacuate.
Tanya, like most children in Ukraine's vast orphanage system, has parents but they were unable to care for her properly so the state took over, the orphanage director said.
Tanya and the orphanage's remaining four children with disabilities travelled some 800km by rail to a different institution far from the fighting.
The 11-hour train journey succeeded in bringing Tanya to safety, but for 40 days she and 16 other children whom Reuters followed from Odesa institutions did not appear in Ukraine's national database. Not until July 25 did national authorities say their location was registered.
It was one example of the difficulties Ukraine has faced tracing children scattered by war.
Tanya and the others she travelled with are now fully accounted for, but UNICEF says it has yet to track some 26,000 other children who — rather than being moved within the orphanage system — were returned to families or legal guardians after Russia invaded.
Reuters spoke to more than a dozen children's rights specialists, child protection organisations and government officials in Ukraine to recount the country's effort to trace the children dismissed from orphanages.
Any attempt to track people fleeing an invasion is fraught.
But child protection workers and international organisations including the United Nations told Reuters they were concerned about the lack of information or record-keeping by Ukrainian ministries on where the children are.
United Nations officials warned that some might be exposed to violence or human trafficking, though they haven't presented specific evidence and Reuters hasn't independently established that.
Ukraine's National Social Service (NSS), tasked with overseeing children's rights, said it had done "everything possible to preserve the lives and health of children and prevent them from being left in the epicentre of hostilities."
It said that support for families is provided by specialised social services, and that it was working to resolve problems.
One per cent of the child population
When Russia invaded on February 24, there were more than 105,000 children in Ukraine's network of more than 700 institutions – known as orphanages or 'internats' – either full-time or part-time.
That's just over 1 per cent of the child population – the highest rate of institutionalisation in Europe, according to data from the European Union and UNICEF.
Around half the children in Ukraine's orphanages had disabilities, according to UNICEF.
But Ukraine's state record-keeping system, known as UIAS "Children," was not capable of tracking or tracing children sent home from institutions, according to the Government Reform Support project in Ukraine (SURGe), a Canadian government-funded agency contracted by the NSS to help support it.
Instead, the database held general information about children such as whether they had siblings or disabilities, or were eligible for adoption.
The team at SURGe began to collect data on the status of children from orphanages manually, using Google forms and Google sheets.
The task was complicated by the fact that the internats come under three different ministries, with responsibility spread across 24 regions, a SURGe spokesperson said.
By late June, SURGe said it had received data from 750 out of751 orphanages in Ukraineon numbers of children sent home, evacuated and remaining.
Hunter rocks
96,000 children returned
By July 29, more than 96,000 children had been dismissed from institutions – sent back to parents or guardians – SURGe's data showed. A further 1,900 children – with parents, like Tanya – had been evacuated to other orphanages within Ukraine.
Of 48,000 children who were full-time residents, some 38,800 were returned to parents or guardians, according to NSS and UNICEF statistics. The government and UNICEF are now working to visit those children.
UNICEF and its local partners say that means locating and visiting each child, including in places where there is fighting.
"Unless you visit every location," said Aaron Greenberg, UNICEF's Senior Regional Advisor for Europe and Central Asia, Child Protection, "it's hard to determine whether there are children missing".
By the end of July, UNICEF and its partners had prioritised 13,047 of the children returned to families from 24-hour care as the most vulnerable and in need of support. They said they would continue to monitor those children and were working to reach others.
On August 11, the UN Human Rights Commission expressed alarm about the wellbeing of children with disabilities from Ukraine's internats. Besides "known problems" within the system, the Commission's experts said, "there is now a lack of information regarding the children's whereabouts".
The known problems it mentioned included neglect, abuse and physical restrictions.
Information and coordination both lacking
Daria Herasymchuk, who works in president Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office as Ukraine's Commissioner for Children's Rights, told Reuters the government had asked ministries with children under their care to monitor their wellbeing and their parents' capacity to provide them with care at home.
But asked about children from institutions who were not tracked, she said coordination needed to be improved.
Specifically, she said there were issues with children evacuated by foster families or guardians and those who left Ukraine in the first 10 days of fighting. But she added that not all the children need intense oversight.
Ms Herasymchuk's office also said it has no information on the condition of 4,777 children sent home from orphanages under Russian occupation in Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson since the war began.
A government website launched in August said Ukraine has collected reports that more than 7,000 children had been taken to Russia.
Reuters could not confirm that.
Social orphans
Tanya, like nine in 10 of the children in Ukraine's orphanage system, is a "social orphan" – children whose parents are unable to care for them or denied parental rights under Ukrainian law.
The laws specify that children may be taken from parents who have chronic addictions or criminal records, for example, or who do not educate their children.
Some parents leave children in institutions while working abroad, child protection workers told Reuters. Asked to comment on the numbers involved, Ms Herasymchuk, the Children's Rights Commissioner, did not respond.
Tanya's parents could not stop working to care for her, orphanage staff said. They signed away their parental rights, the director said. As Tanya's legal guardian, he declined to make them available for interview and it was not possible for reporters to locate them independently.
This was not the first time Ukraine dismissed institutionalised children en masse. Despite that, child protection workers say the country was poorly prepared.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, UNICEF said, 42,000 children, including those with disabilities, were discharged from care without checking their family conditions.
UNICEF's Mr Greenberg said it had unsuccessfully urged Kyiv to adopt software that it and governments use around the world to produce a digital trail following children. Such software allows for children's medical records and health needs to be recorded.
President Zelenskyy's office and the NSS did not respond to a request for comment on that.
Convention on the rights of the child
Ukraine ratified the Right to Family, part of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in 1991.
That right is part of the European Union's charter and other states in eastern Europe such as Romania and Slovakia have received EU funding to close institutions that house children, said Peter McDermott, the CEO of Lumos, a UK-based charity working to end systemic institutionalisation.
Ukraine, recently admitted as a candidate to join the EU, did not receive EU funds to close institutions and has bucked that trend. Since 1990, its rate of children in institutions has increased almost fourfold, the most recent comparable data shows. In nearby EU countries, it was flat or fell.
Poverty is the main reason children are sent into institutions – 80 per cent of families fall below the poverty line after the birth of their second child, according to a 2021 study on child protection systems by Ukraine's former Commissioner for Children's Rights, Mykola Kuleba, who was in office from 2014 to 2021.
Institutional issues
Some childcare professionals say that the longer a child stays in an institution, the more likely they are to suffer developmental damage.
"Children need to be able to form an attachment to at least a single adult," said John Williamson, an American social worker who worked for more than 40 years on programmes for children outside family care and was a consultant for organisations including the UN.
With that in mind, in 2017, Ukraine drew up legislation to reduce children in its institutions. The Odesa boarding school where Tanya lived was meant to be part of that effort, its director said.
Visitors in June caught the fragrance of roses lining the path to squat buildings. In the garden, residents tended tomatoes, lettuce and eggplants. Overhead, rooftops were painted with white squares and red crosses.
Orphanage director Andriy Pechenyi said it housed about 110 people before the war, a mix of disabled children and adults. A former comedian, he said he and President Zelenskyy had been part of the same comedy troupe, although at different times. He took up this role in 2021 to help with reforms.
"We all understand that there won't be children in orphanage boarding schools in Ukraine soon," Mr Pechenyi said. "We are heading in the European direction."
Children with disabilities are evaluated before being placed in internats.
Irina Nikolaeva Ogurtsova, who worked with Tanya, said children in Odesa attended three 35-minute classes a week, mostly speech therapy and communication. The rest of the time they joined in other activities – gardening, sewing, drawing and painting, staff said.
In Odesa when reporters visited, residents flocked around the director, hugging him spontaneously or seeking to show him craft work. Some also clung to reporters, asking for hugs.
Government reverses reforms
In June 2021, Mr Zelenskyy's government backtracked on some of the 2017 reforms, approved under a previous administration.
It decided to exclude some kinds of institutions and keep around 50,000 children in care – including those with disabilities and children under the age of three.
Mr Zelenskyy did not respond to a request for comment on the decision. Ms Herasymchuk, Ukraine's Commissioner for Children's Rights, said Ukraine wanted to reform the system, but the government first needed to provide support to families to allow them to care for their children independently.
Closing schools is a politically sensitive endeavour in Ukraine since the orphanages represent one of the few reliable providers of jobs and also bring in cash to local communities, child protection experts say, though Ukraine's government does not publish aggregated data on their budgets.
In a 2021 report, the former Commissioner for Children's Rights Mr Kuleba, said maintaining one child in them costs more than UAH 200,000 ($7,900) a year on average. For comparison, Ukraine's GDP per capita last year was $7,046, according to the World Bank.
Orphanage director Mr Pechenyi declined to specify financial details and the NSS did not respond to a request for comment on that.
Tanya first entered the Odesa orphanage in 2018 at age 8, after her parents divorced and her mother had a second child, staff said.
In June, as the war pushed closer to Odesa, orphanage staff said they phoned Tanya's mother to ask if she could collect her.
She still didn't have the resources, so the state took responsibility for moving Tanya to another institution, Mr Pechenyi said.
Reuters could not independently confirm this account.
Lelechenya: Little Stork
In June, nurses accompanied Tanya on the 11-hour train ride west. Her carers told Reuters during a visit to the orphanage they were worried – a gesture as slight as the turn of a page in a book can distress a child with autism.
Together with children from nearby institutions, loaded in six ambulances, they were brought to the station, where police prevented filming. Tanya was moved to a former hospital in the village of Dzhuriv in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.
When Tanya arrived at the Lelechenya (Little Stork) rehabilitation centre, she was tearful and agitated, according to a Reuters reporter who visited a few days later.
The centre's director, Lilia Ambrozivna, said the home was not designed for residential use, and she was used to children with "simpler conditions."
The new arrivals were unpredictable, frantic, Ms Ambrozivna said.
However, by August, Tanya was "settling well," according to the director.
>Has it been established Xi is the bad guy?
>Francisco Delgado, 26, and Jose Molina, 21
>largest single fentanyl bust in the history of the Phoenix Police Department with the seizure of more than one million pills
that's pretty cool
https://twitter.com/CAPAction/status/1573009427107819521
Extreme MAGA Republican gun laws and inflammatory language have led to a spike in violent crime. When #MAGAIncitesGunViolence, we all pay the price.
https://twitter.com/ClintonGlobal/status/1572217068040196096
The Clinton Global Initiative community stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We’re honored to be joined by President @ZelenskyyUa at #CGI2022. Watch his conversation with President @BillClinton live at http://clintonglobal.org/2022
>The Clinton Global Initiative community stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We’re honored to be joined by President @ZelenskyyUa at #CGI2022. Watch his conversation with President @BillClinton live at http://clintonglobal.org/2022
Watch President Bill Clinton's Conversation with President Zelenskyy at CGI 2022
>quiver
>share
>Thanks for me having me on @Gutfeldfox
>33 years in the CBN was enough for me; banking was no longer what it used to be and I did not want to go to prison.