Free Republic

CV NEWS FEED // Florida legislators are working to expand current Safe Haven policy in hopes of lowering the number of abortions in the state. All states have a Safe Haven policy that allows for a mother to anonymously surrender her newborn up for adoption at participating hospitals and EMS and fire stations. Barring any signs of abuse or neglect, there will be no questions asked and no criminal charges. The specifics of the policies vary by state. In Florida, the newborn can be surrendered up to seven days after birth. The new legislation would expand the current Safe Haven...

Lorraine Sue Garza, 45, was charged on June 18 with two counts of abandoning or endangering a child. According to the arrest report, a woman called police because she was giving three children, ages 11, 13, and 15, food and letting them shower at her home. The children told her that their mother left the house on June 3 and hasn't been back since. San Antonio police spoke with the 15-year-old girl, who told them that their mother just left and took the family's only cell phone with her, so there was no way they could contact her. The water...

Attorneys at a hearing to determine who would receive temporary custody of the 5-year-old boy told a judge Friday morning that his mother and an aunt had been notified that the hearing would take place but that neither were in the courtroom to speak on his behalf. His father hadn’t yet been found, and the grandmother who abandoned him Tuesday at Kohl’s when she bolted from a shoplifting stop was still on the run from law enforcement, Sedgwick County Assistant District Attorney Amanda Marino said. The judge placed the child in the temporary custody of the state.

A Brownsville mother is facing criminal charges after she left her five children home alone while she went to go eat dinner. Brownsville police arrested 23-year-old Janerit Velez on child abandonment charges early Wednesday morning. Investigators told Action 4 News that officers were called to a home on the 3600 block of Ramirez Lane around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Neighbors told police that five children, ranging in ages 2 to 8 years old, were left home alone. Officers reported that they waited an hour before Velez showed up. Velez allegedly told officers that she had only been gone for an hour...

A family dog in Thailand is credited with bringing home an abandoned newborn baby on Monday. The two-year-old canine named Pui found a plastic bag with a newborn baby girl inside and carried the infant back home. Officials believe the baby was abandoned at a roadside dump in Tha Rua district of Ayutthaya province. According to a report in the Bangkok Post, when Pui returned home, it barked loudly to get it’s owners’ attention. A 12-year-old girl named Sudarat Thongmak came out of the home and was shocked to find the baby with her umbilical cord still attached. After getting...

LONDON — For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.” Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague...

SNIPPET: "CLARKSTON, Wash. -- The family of a missing Clarkston woman says Rachel Anderson, 40, was stalked for weeks by an unknown caller to her cell phone. Clarkston Police believe Anderson's disappearance is suspicious." SNIPPET: "The last time anyone saw her was the evening of Friday, April 16. Detectives traveled to Moscow, Idaho and searched a building where Anderson was last seen. Detectives were in touch with Anderson well before she disappeared because she had filed several harassment complaints with police. Her family says for months someone was texting her strange messages, calling her, and then hanging up. They fear...

...Sylvia Montalvo de Aquino seems ill-cast as the Salvadoran consulate's designated enforcer against deadbeat dads. But the immigrant fathers -- and occasionally mothers -- whom de Aquino summons to her Washington office know otherwise. "My husband often jokes that he'd hate to be in their shoes, because, the truth is, I can get really harsh," de Aquino said, giggling. "I'll say to them, 'Did you just somehow forget that your child needs to eat three times a day? You think nothing of wasting a dollar on a candy bar or a beer here, while with that dollar your kid could...

Lottery-Like Awards Crush Fathers, Make Mothers RichChild Support Queens Praise Michigan's Mike Cox February 24, 2004 By MND NEWSWIRE The largest child-support organization in the nation announced today that Michigan Attorney General Mike will receive its Golden Hearts Award. The Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES), a non- profit, child-advocacy organization with 50,000 members and 400 chapters in 48 states, recognized Cox for focusing attention on the $7 billion owed to Michigan children in unpaid child support. Past award recipients include New York Gov. George Pataki and U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. "This award is a...

<p>When found wandering on a Metairie street last month, the 8-year-old boy was dirty, bleeding and covered with mosquito bites, and hadn't eaten for two days, authorities said.</p> <p>For at least a day before being abandoned, Stephen Crawford, who had never been to school, cannot read or write and doesn't know his own birthday, heard his father talk about "dumping him." On Sept. 23, Paul Crawford put his son in the car and drove from their Kenner home toward Metairie while the boy begged his father not to throw him out, according to police reports.</p>