A southern Chinese province has begun investigating a report that officials seized at least 16 babies born in violation of strict family planning rules, sent them to welfare centers and then sold them abroad for adoption.
The children in Longhui County near Shaoyang City, Hunan Province had been taken away by officials since 2005 after their parents were accused of breaching the one-child policy or illegally adopting children, Caixin Century magazine reported.
The local family planning office then sent the children to local welfare centers, which listed them as being available for adoption, the report said, adding the office received 1,000 yuan (US$154) or more for each child.
Some of the seized children were the only child of couples who were often away working in the cities, the magazine added.
At least one migrant worker said she returned home to find that her daughter had been adopted abroad and was now living in the US, it said. The welfare centers received as much as US$3,000 for each child placed in overseas adoption.
“Before 1997, they usually punished us by tearing down our houses for breaching the one-child policy, but after 2000 they began to confiscate our children,” it quoted villager Yuan Chaoren as saying.
The Shaoyang government is now investigating the case, the popular tabloid the Global Times reported yesterday, though it quoted one official as denying any involvement in child trafficking.
“When we identified children who had been born illegally, we fined the parents in accordance with the law,” the anonymous official told the newspaper.
Provincial officials, whose promotion can be linked to the effectiveness of measures to stop people from having more babies, have often been criticized for using violence or coercion to enforce tough family planning policies.
Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), a blind legal activist, drew international attention when he took on officials over forced abortions in his home province of Shandong and was jailed. He was released in September, more than four years after being convicted of damaging property and disrupting traffic in a protest and has been held under virtual house arrest in his village ever since.
With a population expected to peak at 1.65 billion in 2033, China has been cautious about dropping its one-child policy originally implemented to spare the country the pressures of feeding and clothing hundreds of millions of additional people.
China already allows a number of exceptions to the policy, and some experts have called for a greater relaxation to tackle the problem posed by a population ageing before it first becomes rich.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS