Marshall Islands

More than three months after President Bush signed an amended international agreement that could halt a "frenzy" of adoptions of Marshall Islands children in Hawaii and Utah, no schedule to enforce the pact has been worked out between the State Department and the small country in the western Pacific. "The delay in implementation is jeopardizing the integrity of the adoption process and encouraging a frenzy of unethical adoptions," said Jini Roby, a Utah professor and attorney who has been serving as an unpaid consultant to the Marshall Islands government on the adoption issue and who helped write the country's adoption statute.

Jeffrey Brauner of Baltimore saw a global satellite image and noticed a "line of clouds extending all the way from the East Coast, across the southern U.S. and Pacific ... to the Marshall Islands. Is that very unusual?" NWS science officer Steve Zubrick says it's not: "It's sometimes called the Pineapple Express. ... It's basically a plume of moisture flowing along with the jet stream. It can span thousands of miles" and sometimes transports heavy precipitation.

Charles N. Henry - an American who is chief justice of the High Court for the Republic of the Marshall Islands - was perturbed but not terribly concerned when his biweekly paycheck failed to arrive while he was in California visiting an ailing relative in October. It was only when he called his clerk about the delay that he learned his problem was far more serious and would soon land him in a courtroom on the wrong side of the bench. A criminal complaint had been filed against Henry by the Marshall Islands attorney general, charging him with the crime of "cheating."

The top adoption official in the Marshall Islands says that, with a new international agreement finally in effect, it is time for state and federal officials in the United States to take aggressive steps to stop the illegal adoption of Marshallese children by Americans. Michael Jenkins, head of the Central Adoption Authority, said yesterday that without strict enforcement, such adoptions are likely to continue. This will happen, he warned, despite the signing Saturday of a mandate in the Compact of Free Association governing relations between the United States and the Pacific island nation that requires pregnant Marshallese women to get visas before coming to the United States to give up their newborns for adoption.

MAJURO, Republic of the Marshall Islands -- Nature blessed the Marshall Islands with warm Pacific breezes, tropical fruits, schooling fish and turquoise lagoons.But a half-century of U.S. control and influence here since World War II has cursed them with illness and crumbling medical care.The Marshallese still live with the contamination, illness, displacement, dependency and fear brought on by U.S. nuclear tests in the 1940s and 1950s - 67 blasts with a total power 7,000 times that unleashed on Hiroshima, Japan, in wartime.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands -- the scene of atomic bomb tests by the United States in the 1940s and '50s -- signed a $40,000 agreement yesterday with the University of Maryland School of Medicine to conduct a broad assessment of the health care needs of the country's 52,000 inhabitants.A team of three UM doctors is to leave for the Pacific nation this weekend for an 11-day study of the general health of the residents and to review the adequacy of the health care system and public health infrastructure.

MAJURO, Republic of the Marshall Islands -- There is precious little to this island nation, a family of dots sprinkled onto the Pacific halfway between Hawaii and Australia.No misty volcanic mountains, no rugged seaside cliffs or deep tropical jungles. Only a handful of delicate coral atolls, like jade necklaces, are flung across 2 million square miles of blue ocean.The atolls' slender islands are capped by coconut palms and surrounded by reefs. You can walk across any of them in just a few minutes.

MAJURO, Republic of the Marshall Islands -- Dr. Jack Shannon, the last U.S. Public Health Service dentist in the Marshall Islands, would like to be brightening smiles all over the land.Instead, the wiry, crew-cut former missionary, who heads the only dental practice in this former U.S. Trust Territory, spends most of his time in a cramped hospital clinic here pulling rotten teeth."I've seen 6-year-olds with 18 decayed teeth," he says. "The most [teeth] they can have is 24."An increasingly Western diet heavy with highly refined food and sugar arrived with the Americans after World War II, and now it is turning Marshallese teeth to mush.

George showed he knows there is more to the Middle East than bombing targets.If Yeltsin really made peace on the shores of the Black Sea, his next trick will be to walk on it.Cheer up. The Republic of the Marshall Islands was admitted to the United Nations.

Jeffrey Brauner of Baltimore saw a global satellite image and noticed a "line of clouds extending all the way from the East Coast, across the southern U.S. and Pacific ... to the Marshall Islands. Is that very unusual?" NWS science officer Steve Zubrick says it's not: "It's sometimes called the Pineapple Express. ... It's basically a plume of moisture flowing along with the jet stream. It can span thousands of miles" and sometimes transports heavy precipitation.

More than three months after President Bush signed an amended international agreement that could halt a "frenzy" of adoptions of Marshall Islands children in Hawaii and Utah, no schedule to enforce the pact has been worked out between the State Department and the small country in the western Pacific. "The delay in implementation is jeopardizing the integrity of the adoption process and encouraging a frenzy of unethical adoptions," said Jini Roby, a Utah professor and attorney who has been serving as an unpaid consultant to the Marshall Islands government on the adoption issue and who helped write the country's adoption statute.

After eight years of frustrating and unsuccessful fertility treatments, Joyce Frost and her husband, Richard, thought they had finally found a guaranteed way to bring a child into their family - the adoption of a newborn from the Marshall Islands. The Marietta, N.Y., couple paid a fee of $21,500 to Southern Adoption, a nonprofit agency based in Philadelphia, Miss., that promised them an infant in a short time with minimum problems, they said. The birth mother named Mera, they were told, was due March 16 and had already been flown to Hawaii to deliver her baby.

HONOLULU, Hawaii - Despite a legal ban, U.S. adoption agencies are still luring pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to give birth and relinquish their newborns, according to the director of the western Pacific nation's new Central Adoption Authority. "It comes dangerously close to child trafficking," said Michael Jenkins, noting that a law passed by the Marshall Islands Congress in 2002 requires that, as of last Oct. 1, all such adoptions go through that country's court system. He said he had reports of at least five women being taken to Hawaii during the past month, based on observations of passengers departing from the nation's international airport.

Three key senators are calling on Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to block the practice of flying pregnant mothers from the Marshall Islands to Hawaii and other U.S. locations to give up their newborns for adoption. In a letter sent to Ridge on Tuesday, the three senators noted recent amendments to the Compact of Free Association that were intended to halt the traffic. The agreement governs relations between the United States and the Marshall Islands. The changes were signed into law Dec. 17 by President Bush.

The story sounded bizarre to Michael Jenkins, head of the Marshall Islands' newly created Central Adoption Authority. But his recent experience convinced him that it was also plausible. A pregnant young woman from the Marshall Islands had traveled to Hawaii to visit friends and family. Shortly after her arrival, she was approached by an agent from an adoption agency, and she signed over her unborn child for adoption. "It sounded aggressive, almost predator-like," said Jenkins, recounting the complaint registered recently with his agency by a relative of the expectant mother.

The House gave overwhelming approval yesterday to a 20-year extension of an agreement with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands that would provide $3.5 billion in aid and for the first time place controls on recruiters who sign up workers from those countries for low-paying jobs in the United States. The bill, which now goes to the president, extends the Compact of Free Association, the 1986 agreement that governs relations between the United States and the two former U.S. trust territories.

The story sounded bizarre to Michael Jenkins, head of the Marshall Islands' newly created Central Adoption Authority. But his recent experience convinced him that it was also plausible. A pregnant young woman from the Marshall Islands had traveled to Hawaii to visit friends and family. Shortly after her arrival, she was approached by an agent from an adoption agency, and she signed over her unborn child for adoption. "It sounded aggressive, almost predator-like," said Jenkins, recounting the complaint registered recently with his agency by a relative of the expectant mother.

SARASOTA, Fla. - For two families in Florida, the pain of an adoption gone wrong is plainly visible on their faces. Carmen and Darlene Scoma talk sadly about the child from the Marshall Islands they thought they had legally claimed in Hawaii in 1997. For 4 1/2 years, Atina Erakdrik had been their daughter, until they lost her early last year after a bitter court battle. "She's our daughter. She will always be our daughter," says Darlene Scoma, her voice quavering. In Fruitland Park, 130 miles north, Atina's birth mother, Molly Juna, 31, who traveled more than 7,000 miles to reclaim her child, talks about the pain she endured during the protracted court fight.

At the last minute, the Senate has dropped an amendment to a treaty extension that would have given Tyco International Ltd. a $67.4 million, no-bid contract to connect two Pacific island nations and a major U.S. military installation to an undersea fiber-optic cable. Aides to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said the provision was stripped late Thursday because of objections raised by the House Judiciary Committee. It had been in an extension of the Compact of Free Association, a 17-year-old treaty that governs relations between the United States and two former trust territories, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

A $67.4 million, no-bid contract for Tyco International Ltd., which will be heavily financed with U.S. tax dollars, has been quietly slipped in as a side agreement to a pending bill that provides about $3.5 billion in aid to two Pacific island countries. Tyco would provide fiber optic cable connections to the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, where a major U.S. military installation on the Kwajalein Atoll would be linked. The firm has come under scrutiny recently for reincorporating in Bermuda, thus avoiding millions in U.S. tax obligations.