Russia, U.S. Officials Break Up Illegal Child Adoption Ring

Russian and American authorities have broken up a network that illegally gathered confidential information on children and sold it to adoption agencies. According to Russian authorities, the group was effectively engaged in trafficking in children. The number of Russian adoptions has dropped from 14,000 to about 7,000 annually since the early 1990s, while the number of foreign adoptions rose from 1,400 to 9,000. U.S. families account for half of those. Source:  KYIVPost.com. For more information on this story, please click here (last visited January 25, 2006, reo).