Local officials have been accused of seizing baby girls from parents who broke birth control limits and helping hand them on to adoptive parents overseas for the equivalent of about £1,800 (US$2,930) each, Chinese media reported.
Six officials have been punished after children were wrongly sent to an orphanage, local authorities in Guizhou Province confirmed. The authorities were still looking into the role of the institution in the affair.
“According to our investigation, it is true that babies who have parents were forced into the orphanage and then abroad,” an official from the Zhenyuan County family planning bureau told a newspaper that uncovered the story.
The Southern Metropolis News said family planning officers removed the children when their parents could not afford to pay the fine for excess births.
The Chinese newspaper Time Weekly reported claims that officials forged documents stating that the babies were orphans, and that they split adoption fees with the orphanage.
The newspaper also said that almost 80 infants from Zhenyuan had been adopted by US and European families since 2001, although many were genuine orphans or given up voluntarily.
While rural couples in China are usually allowed to have two children, in comparison with urban couples who can generally have only one, many have more offspring, often unintentionally or because they keep trying for a son.
Yang Shuiying told Time Weekly that a family planning official warned that he would take away her fifth child unless she paid about 20,000 yuan, a sum roughly four times the household’s annual income.
When she said she wanted to keep her daughter, he replied: “You are so poor, how can you pay? Why didn’t you have an abortion?”
The official has since been punished for “misleading” Yang and her husband.
Another man, Li Zeji, said he and his wife gave their third child to a cousin and went to work in another town to stop officials discovering they had broken the rules.
“The family planning people in our village are very tough. Sometimes they smash houses and take away cows or TVs as a penalty,” he said. “[When they found out] they took away the kid and said I did not need to pay.”
He said each night he would dream his daughter was calling “Daddy” but could never see her face.
Investigators said officials took the baby from Li’s cousin, who claimed she found it abandoned, but did not do proper checks before putting the child into care.
The newspaper said that when pressed about the cases, a Zhenyuan official told them: “If the real parents still exist after investigation, they can get their children back after going through procedures.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS