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Tuesday, 13 March 2007

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It's official: Angelina Jolie free to get new son

Vietnamese adoption has been approved

A Vietnamese official says Angelina Jolie's adoption application is being processed quickly and she might be mom to a new 3½-year-old son within weeks.

Officials in Ho Chi Minh City are reviewing Jolie's file and should be finished by March 31 at the latest, the director of Vietnam's International Adoption Department, Vu Duc Long, told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

Jolie, 31, will be free to pick up the child any time after the approval is granted, he said.

Long told the AP last week that the boy is from the Tam Binh orphanage on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, which Jolie and Brad Pitt, 43, visited over Thanksgiving.

Orphanage director Nguyen Van Trung tells the AP the boy Jolie plans to adopt was abandoned at a Ho Chi Minh City hospital as an infant and then taken to the orphanage, where the staff tried, without success, to locate his parents.

"He is in good health," Trung said, adding that he gets along with the other children and likes playing soccer. "He is a little bit shy."

Trung also said Jolie's adoption is being processed quickly because the boy is older and his files were already nearly complete.

Vietnamese law makes it difficult for unmarried couples to adopt so Jolie is applying solo, but she and Pitt had planned for months to welcome a Vietnamese sibling for Maddox, 5, Zahara, 2, and 10-month-old Shiloh.

It was a "process that began shortly after Shiloh was born [in May]," a source told PEOPLE in its most recent cover story.

But it wasn't until March 2 that Vu Duc Long revealed Jolie had filed to adopt in Vietnam, a country which, a source close to Jolie told PEOPLE, has a complex and thorough screening process for foreign adopters.