china

China is investigating whether hundreds of children, most aged between nine and 16, were sold to factories in Guangdong Province over the past five years to work as slave laborers, state media said. Chinese authorities inspected more than 3,600 businesses in Dongguan, the center of the child labor scandal, state press reported yesterday, after children were found working in factories.

Serfs and slaves accounted for 95 percent of the Tibetan population (peasants 60%, herdsmen 20%, and lower-class monks 15%). They were owned by serf-owners, just like the means of production. They had no political rights or personal freedom.

Move over BRIC. RIC or the troika of Russia, India and China are taking over. A regional formation will take up international issues like the reform of the UN and the Security Council, according to Konstantin V Vnukov, director, first Asia department, Russian foreign ministry, and head of delegation for trilateral cooperation between India, Russia and China, on a visit to the capital for the seventh ministerial of the troika.

From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions. Freak weather is a factor. But so are dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves and growing consumer demand in China and India. The world's poorest nations still harbor the greatest hunger risk. Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month. But food protests now crop up even in Italy. And while the price of spaghetti has doubled in Haiti, the cost of miso is packing a hit in Japan.

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

The continued rise of the emerging economies, particularly India and China, is never far from the headlines. What impact these economies will have on the twenty-first century is the subject of much debate, with the possibility of a shift in global political power a recurring theme. It is often assumed that the emerging economies are following the same path to development that the established economic powers did - but this assumption is worth questioning.

While the trend of government surveillance is on the rise across the world, the US has emerged as the country whose citizens enjoyed privacy protection the least last year, according to an annual report.

As U.S. unilateralism has asserted its role as the sole global superpower, the rest of the world is exploring a variety of ways of pushing back. One is the creation of several new regional security consortiums which are independent of the U.S.

Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine to go into our annual Outlook report. Over the years, Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal developments as the Internet, virtual reality, and the end of the Cold War. Here are the editors' top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2008:

Bric - another acronym every silicon.com reader should be aware of and, no, it's nothing to do with Microsoft or operating systems. It actually stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China and was coined by the investment bank Goldman Sachs when they published a report titled Dreaming of Brics in 2003. The report was essentially some controlled future gazing, based on economic fundamentals and projections right out to 2050.