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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS