In recent months, I have been reporting on what is one of the most alarming scandals in Britain today – the secretive system that allows social workers to remove children from loving families without any proper justification, and to send them for adoption or fostering with no apparent concern for their interests.

Four more examples have come to light in the past week. The first came to my attention via Lynn Boleyn, a former councillor from Dudley, who first became concerned about “forced adoption” when she sat on various committees concerned with child care. Last week, she was in court with a mother of five girls, whose family tragedy began when her partner was sentenced to 14 years for abusing the eldest girl, who was sent to live with a relative. Although there was no evidence of their mother harming them in any way, the other four girls were seized by Dudley social services and placed in foster care. Three were kept together, separated from their two-year-old sister whom the council now wants to put out for adoption.

The three girls, aged 11, 10 and 7, are desperately unhappy, constantly asking to be reunited with their mother. But on Friday, a judge said he had no power to stop social services summarily withdrawing them from their local school to be sent to a new home. The 11-year-old was looking forward to being in the school play and the end of term Leavers’ Service. She has now been torn away from friends she has known since she was four, the nearest thing to stability left in her life. The children’s wishes were not taken into account.

A second case concerns another woman, for 20 years an NHS nurse who served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the first Gulf War. Until recently, she was a semi-professional dog breeder, living happily at home with her eight-year-old son (his father having walked out when she was pregnant).

In March, their home was raided by two RSPCA officials and five policemen, complaining she had too many dogs in the house. Her home was untidy because she was clearing an attic, but the seizing of the dogs (breaking the leg of one of them) left it a befouled mess.

Acting on a tip-off from the RSPCA, Leeds social workers then intervened, and expressed surprise that the house was tidier than they expected. Nevertheless, they told the mother to bring her son’s clothes to school, from where he was taken into foster care.

After three months, during which he has only been allowed short supervised “contact” with his mother, the boy is miserable, constantly asking when he can return home. His mother has repeatedly had to draw the social workers’ attention to various conditions, such as head lice and threadworm, which indicated that he was not being properly cared for. Last week they announced that they were moving him to another foster home.

Although there was no evidence that she was anything other than an admirable mother, apart from the temporary mess made of the house in March, the social workers say her son cannot be allowed home until they have both undergone “psychiatric assessments”. These cannot be arranged until October. Nor has the boy yet been given a guardian to represent him, as the law lays down.

My other two cases come from Ian Josephs, the former county councillor and businessman who runs the Forced Adoption website and has helped hundreds of families in a similar plight. When, in January, a couple brought their newborn son to hospital with a fractured arm, Coventry social services were called in on suspicion that the child might have been injured by his parents. After the mother had been arrested, handcuffed and held by the police for nine hours, the couple were terrified that their baby would be taken from them. Although not charged with any offence, they are on police bail, which prevents them from leaving the country.

The child’s Irish grandmother took the baby to Ireland, where he is now surrounded by a large, supportive family. Social services are attempting to get an order through the courts for the grandmother to return to England with the baby.

My last case is so shocking that I will return to it in more detail at a later date. It centres on a London couple who, earlier this year, had their six children seized by social workers on what appears to be flimsy hearsay evidence (I have seen the court papers).

The mother was pregnant again. Last month, after the boy was born, three social workers and five policemen entered the hospital ward where she was breastfeeding at 3am, wresting the baby from her by force. They then discovered that they had nowhere to keep him. The boy was put into intensive care, where his mother was taken to breastfeed him for four days, until she was fit to leave the hospital. She saw her baby for the last time two weeks ago.

I will return to this story when I have had some explanation from the council responsible.

The oil giant was forced to issue new guidelines to staff to “refrain from doing (sic) cutting-and-pasting” after several official company images were found to have been doctored.

BP admitted on Thursday that it “Photoshopped” some of its official images that were posted on its website and vowed to stop the embarrassing practice.

For the second time in two days, the company was identified to have doctored images posted on its official website that were supposed to show how it was responding to the oil crisis in America.

In the latest image, a photo taken inside a company helicopter appeared to show it flying off the coast near the damaged Deepwater Horizon rig.

But it was later shown to be faked after internet bloggers identified several problems with the poorly produced image that contradicted the appearance that it was flying.

Among the problems identified included part of a control tower appearing in the top of the top left of the picture, different shades of colours, its pilot holding a pre-flight checklist and its control gauges showing the helicopter’s door and ramp open and its parking brake engaged.

The image was posted on the official BP website but later removed.

It has since been posted to the company’s official Flickr account under the heading “BP altered images, which also includes a further two faked pictures.

The image, entitled “View of the MC 252 site from the cockpit of a PHI S-92 helicopter 26 June 2010”, was first identified by Gizmodo, a technology news website, which posted the images on Thursday after a tip-off from a reader.

Another image has also been exposed as faked, which BP admitted appeared to be “cut and pasted”.

BP admitted the image of a meeting in its Houston office, showing a technical team in front of a large projection screen, had been “edited” using colouring tools. This was to ensure the detail on the projection screen could be seen to readers.

The disclosures have created further embarrassment for the oil giant and is the latest blunder to hit the company.

It comes less than a day after the oil giant was criticised for doctoring an image of image of its Gulf Coast oil spill command centre, which indicated that staff were busier than they actually were.

It later acknowledged that it posted on its website an altered photo that exaggerated the level of activity at the centre in Houston.

In a statement to The Daily Telegraph on Thursday, BP admitted that it edited images it posted on its official “Gulf of Mexico Response” website.

“BP’s photographic department uses Photoshop to edit images we post on the bp.com Gulf of Mexico Response web site,” a spokesman said.

“Typical purposes include colour correction, reducing glare and cropping. In a few cases, cut-and-paste was also used in the photo-editing process. These cut-and-pasted images have been removed.

“We’ve instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing (sic) cutting-and-pasting in the future.”

He added that both the original and edited images have been posted on its official Flickr page “for comparison”.

He said the company had included an image that “appears cut-and-pasted, but was edited using the colour saturation tool to improve the visibility of a projection screen image”.

The BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and causing one of America’s worst environmental crises.

The well has spewed somewhere between 94 million and 184 million gallons into the Gulf. BP said the cost of dealing with the spill has now reached nearly $4 billion.

A US Senate panel has invited Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, to testify next week at a hearing on the release of the Lockerbie bomber.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also is requesting testimony from Sir Mark Allen, who has served as an advisor to BP.

Mr Hayward and other oil bosses are expected to give evidence to a new UK political inquiry into offshore deep-water drilling.

That inquiry, expected to start later this year, will ask “serious questions” about the oil companies’ plans for dealing with spills, including key safety devices such as blowout preventers.