The next sound you hear will be that of me tooting my own horn. It will be a short, subdued toot, but a toot nonetheless.

Reason for a tiny toot? This news item on adoption that quotes me.

When contacted by the Agence France-Press for information, my immediate inclination was to ask that any report on the present adoption climate be balanced, and I think including my comments may have added a bit to that.

If you're following the news from Britain alleging that social welfare groups are taking children into care and offering them for adoption at an alarming rate, here is a link to a transcript of a BBC broadcast on the topic.

Also from the UK, this on child trafficking in Wales and how the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to deal with the situation.

Should 'trafficking' and 'Britain' not seem to go together, know that official figures put the number of children trafficked into the UK for "slavery, forced labour, prostitution, illegal adoption, to act as drug mules or for the removal of organs" at more than 300 in three years.

Please note that this has nothing to do with adoption.

In the US an attempt in Missouri to reduce the number of clinics offering abortion has been temporarily blocked in Federal Court.

The law would change the categorization of abortion clinics to "outpatient surgery centers", thereby requiring them to meet different building, staffing and health standards.

Planned Parenthood is fighting the change.

In the first news I've seen to come out of the Kentucky Summit on Children I wrote about recently the Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court, Justice Joseph E. Lambert, has announced that he's expecting legislation to be introduced next year that would allow judges to open proceedings for children in precarious circumstances, meaning that extended families could be invited into court.

In January, in a report that said state social workers lied in court and falsified documents as they took children from their parents, then-state Inspector General Robert J. Benvenuti called for the General Assembly to change laws so that those particular court proceedings are now open.

The summit continues, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of this first-of-its-kind meeting in that state.