31, May 2021
China allows couples to have up to three children 0
China has relaxed its family planning policy to allow couples to have a maximum of three children after a census showed its population is rapidly ageing, state media Xinhua reported Monday.
For almost 40 years, China enforced a controversial “one-child policy” — one of the strictest family planning regulations worldwide — which was lifted in 2016 due to widespread concerns over an ageing workforce and economic stagnation.
“To actively respond to the ageing of the population … a couple can have three children,” Xinhua said, citing a Monday meeting of China’s elite Politburo leadership committee hosted by President Xi Jinping.
Despite government efforts to encourage childbirths, China’s annual births have continued to plummet to a record low of 12 million in 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics said last month.
China’s fertility rate stands at 1.3 — below the level needed to maintain a stable population, the bureau revealed.
The once-in-a-decade 2020 census results published last month also showed that China’s population grew at its slowest rate since the 1960s, reaching 1.41 billion.
It comes alongside a sharp drop in the number of working-age people, once again raising fears of a looming demographic crisis.
China’s gender balance has also been skewed by decades of the one-child policy, and a traditional social preference for boys which prompted a generation of sex-selective abortions and abandoned baby girls.
(AFP)
31, May 2021
Gunmen abduct children from Islamic school in central Nigeria 0
Gunmen on Sunday kidnapped scores of children from an Islamic seminary in central Nigeria’s Niger state, police and residents said.
Some 200 children were at the school at the time of the attack, the Niger state government said on Twitter, adding that “an unconfirmed number” were taken.
The abduction came a day after 14 students from a university in northwestern Nigeria were freed after 40 days in captivity.
Niger state police spokesman Wasiu Abiodun said the attackers arrived on motorbikes in Tegina town and started shooting indiscriminately, killing one resident and injuring another, before kidnapping the children from the Salihu Tanko Islamic school.
One of the school’s officials, who asked not to be named, said the attackers initially took more than 100 children “but later sent back those they considered too small for them, those between four and 12 years old”.
The state government, in a series of tweets, said the attackers had released 11 of the pupils who were “too small and couldn’t walk” very far.
Armed gangs are terrorising inhabitants in northwest and central Nigeria by looting villages, stealing cattle, and taking people hostage.
Such seizures have become a frequent way for criminals to collect ransoms.
Since December 2020, 730 children and students have been kidnapped, before the attack on Sunday.
On April 20, gunmen known locally as “bandits” stormed Greenfield University in northwestern Nigeria and kidnapped around 20 students, killing a member of the school’s staff in the process.
Five students were executed a few days later to force families and the government to pay a ransom. Fourteen of the students were released on Saturday.
Local press said that the families had paid a ransom totalling 180 million naira ($440,000) for their release.
The criminal gangs maintain camps in the Rugu forest which straddles Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Niger states.
Their motives have been financial with no ideological leanings but there is growing concern they are being infiltrated by jihadists from the northeast waging a 12-year-old insurrection to establish an Islamic state.
Source: AFP