MATTERS OF THE HEART  Thursday, September 18, 2008

Humanitarian efforts are delicate issues, and the U.S. State Department's suspended East African family-reunification is a prime example. The program, known as Priority Three (P3), was instituted to reunify families from civil war-torn areas with relatives living in the U.S. Complaints of fraud led officials to conduct DNA testing earlier this year in an effort to establish legitimate family ties before allowing refugees entry into the U.S. The results showed only a small fraction, about 20 percent, of individuals were actually blood relations. Critics of the testing, and subsequent suspension of the program, claim family ties are a grey area in the affected countries, including Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, since men and women often raise and take responsibility for orphaned and abandoned children. State Department officials understand critics' concerns but insist they have to set a standard to balance the need of all refugees seeking entry, which totaled more than 45,000 in the last year. Officials hope to resume the program once they reconcile the fraud issues, though there is no set date.

[Wall Street Journal]

FINAL MASTERPIECE  Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Salvador Dali is known as the father of Modern Surrealism in the art world. The question a 56-year-old Spanish woman has, though, is if he's her biological father. Known only as Pilar A., the woman claims Dali had an affair with her mother who spent one summer working as a housekeeper in Catalonia, Spain, where Dali lived. Dali, who died in 1989, and his wife of 45 years, Gala, who died in 1982, had no children together. DNA testing from a "death mask" Dali created proved inconclusive but Pilar is awaiting results from tests performed on medical samples saved before his death.

[Daily Telegraph]

THE WAITING GAME  Thursday, September 11, 2008

DNA test results carry weight that crosses cultural boundaries. In a shocking and victorious move for a Middle Eastern woman, a Higher Shariah Court has mandated the corpse of a Bahraini man be exhumed to perform a DNA paternity test. The children from his first marriage did not know that he remarried until his death in 2006. They have since disputed that the son born during that union is their father's. This is the first case in Bahrain in which a judge has ordered a body to be exhumed. Positive test results mean the woman and child must be officially recognized as members of the dead man's family.

[arabianbusiness.com]

WHEELS OF CHANGE  Thursday, September 4, 2008

Current state law in Mississippi allows DNA test results to be used in both prosecutions and to free those wrongly convicted. Yet, there are no regulations making it mandatory to preserve biological evidence to perform testing. State legislators know the value of DNA testing and are taking steps to make it more readily available in criminal cases by setting up a task force. The group of leaders and lawmakers formed to put the wheels of change in motion met for the first time on August 11^th of this year.

[WAPT - Jackson]