China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection has acknowledged the existence of “cancer villages,” after years of assertions by academics and domestic media that polluted areas experience higher rates of the disease.
The use of the term in an official report, thought to be unprecedented, comes as authorities face growing discontent over industrial waste, hazardous smog and other environmental and health consequences of years of rapid growth.
“Poisonous and harmful chemical materials have brought about many water and atmosphere emergencies ... certain places are even seeing ‘cancer villages,’” said a five-year plan that was highlighted this week.
The report did not elaborate on the phenomenon, which has no technical definition, but gained prominence in domestic and foreign media after a Chinese journalist posted a map in 2009 pinpointing dozens of such “cancer villages.”
The ministry acknowledged that in general China uses “poisonous and harmful chemical products” that are banned in developed countries and “pose long-term or potential harm to human health and the ecology.”
Environmental lawyer Wang Canfa (王燦發), who runs an aid center in Beijing for victims of pollution, said on Friday it was the first time the “cancer village” phrase had appeared in a ministry document.
“It shows that the environment ministry has acknowledged that pollution has led to people getting cancer,” he said. “It shows that this issue, of environmental pollution leading to health damages, has drawn attention.”
A ministry official who declined to be named could not confirm whether it was the first time it had used the phrase, but said it had previously acknowledged the connection between the environment and human health.
Media reports about “cancer villages” emerged as early as 1998. Official sources such as government Web sites and television stations have altogether reported 241 such locations, a US-based geography professor said in a 2010 study.
The total reached 459 if accounts from “unofficial” sites such as online portals were included, University of Central Missouri academic Lee Liu said in the US-based journal Environment.
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.