Two hundred children are suffering from lead poisoning in southwest China, the nation’s third case of mass sickening in the past month, an official newspaper said yesterday.
Parents in Tongdu, a township in Yunnan Province’s capital of Kunming, blamed the poisoning on a nearby industrial park, while local environmental officials attributed it to vehicle exhaust, the China Daily reported.
60 PERCENT
The Yunnan official overseeing the province’s lead prevention office said that up to 60 percent of children under 14 are suffering from lead poisoning in areas of Yunnan with high mining activity — including Dongchuan, where the industrial park is located.
The Child Lead Prevention and Cure Office in Yunnan conducted the survey of random children last year, director Liu Dakun said.
He declined to take further questions or say how excessive the levels were. He did not comment on this case.
An official with the Yunnan provincial environmental agency, however, said he was unclear of the situation, while calls to the Kunming environmental bureau yesterday rang unanswered.
Earlier last month, more than 1,300 children in central Hunan Province and at least 615 children in northern Shaanxi Province tested positive for lead poisoning, which can damage the nervous and reproductive systems and cause high blood pressure and memory loss.
Those cases have been linked to metal processing plants near their homes and schools. Both plants have been shut down.
ANGER
Anger is growing in China over public safety scandals in which children have been the main victims. The Communist party is worried that mass protests will threaten the country’s social stability and challenge its grip on power.
In the latest lead poisoning case, environmental officials in Tongdu said it was not linked to industrial pollution but to vehicle exhaust, the China Daily said. But the newspaper quoted parents as saying only children living near the industrial park were sickened.
Mining is one of the biggest industries in Yunnan, a mountainous region that is home to many of China’s ethnic minorities and has large deposits of zinc, lead, tin and other metals, according to the provincial government’s Web site.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS