Only one orphan has been adopted in the four months since a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province left some 90,000 people dead or missing, government officials and state media said yesterday.
The 10-year-old boy is from Mianzhu, said a staffer from Sichuan’s Civil Affairs Office who gave only his surname, Zhao.
The orphan was identified Zhang Anyun, a student from the Hanwang Central Primary School, the China Daily said. He was adopted by a couple in the provincial capital of Chengdu.
Both of Zhang’s parents were killed when their apartment collapsed, the report said. His grandparents are alive, but both are more than 80 years old and cannot afford to support him, it said.
The paper said that a total of 532 children lost their parents in the May 12 quake that killed nearly 70,000 people and left another 18,000 missing, but most of them have been taken in by family members or guardians.
The government said last month that only 88 children were eligible for adoption because they had no relatives who could be located or could care for them, the paper said. Of the 88 children, 28 are between five and 10, while 54 are between 10 and 14, the paper said.
One reason for the slow response in finding adoptive homes is that couples are hesitating over adopting handicapped children, the China Daily said, citing sources from the provincial civil affairs department.
Jiang Tao, head of the division in charge of adoption at the provincial civil affairs office, was quoted as saying that adoptive parents preferred children who are under six and are not handicapped. However, many of the quake orphans sustained physical or other injuries during the quake that are permanent handicaps, his office said.
The Civil Affairs Ministry said earlier that people nationwide had shown a huge interest in adopting quake orphans, with 10,000 families registering for adoption in one province alone. The ministry said at the time that priority would be given to parents who had lost children in the quake.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion