China Severely Restricts Video Game Play by Children

Kids and teens under 18 years old in China will only be allowed up to three hours per week to play online video games, according to new rules published by China’s National Press and Publication Administration Monday.

The move is a fresh blow to the country’s gaming giants from Tencent to NetEase which have dealt with an onslaught of regulation this year in areas from anti-monopoly to data protection. That has spooked investors and wiped billions of dollars of value off of Chinese tech stocks.

According to a translated notice about the new rules, people under 18 in China will be allowed one hour a day between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Fridays through Sundays and on legal holidays to play video games. The agency billed the rules as a way to safeguard children’s physical and mental health.

The rules will apply to companies providing online game services to minors, limiting their ability to serve those users outside of designated hours. The companies also will not be allowed to provide services to users who haven’t logged in with real-name registration, preventing them from simply remaining ignorant to their users’ backgrounds.

Read the rest here.

Russian Orthodox Church Publishes Scathing Attack on Pro-Gay UNICEF

As Christians around the world got ready to contemplate the innocence of the child Jesus, last week the Russian Orthodox Church took on a UNICEF paper that says children have LGBT rights.

The Patriarch’s Commission on the Family of the Russian Orthodox Church released a scathing statement criticizing a UNICEF position paper that urges countries to protect LGBT rights because, it says, it is in the “best interests of children.” The Commission turns the tables on UNICEF and says: “Placing children to be raised by same-sex couples is a gross violation of the rights and interests of a child.”

The Orthodox Commission said it was “gravely concerned” that UNICEF would throw its weight behind what it calls notions that are “devoid of sound international legal basis” and “contrary to most of the nations’ traditional cultures, as well as norms of natural and religious morality.” As a result, the commission says it is “harmful to the international community and will undermine the moral legitimacy of UNICEF and other UN bodies.”

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

The real story of the Greece, NY bus outrage is not the old news that 13-year-olds are often monsters but, as I wrote earlier, that the victim and bus driver, both adults, did nothing to stop it. Well-meant crap like No Place for Hate™ is worthless. (Again, if anything it would cause a backlash from the kids.) Those little brats need the ‘board of education’ or a British rattan cane (the discipline that honed natural talent, which built an empire). One to three strapping men are the only ‘Bullying and Violence Response Team’ you need. (The whiny psychologizing is Christian ethics without Christ so it’s emasculated.)

-The Young Fogey

Some ugly facts on child sexual abuse

This past June, Pope Benedict XVI said the church must promise "to do everything possible" to ensure that the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests "will never occur again."

But the president of the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) was not satisfied. She said, "Right now, kids are being assaulted by priests and bishops are concealing the crimes. And the pope continues taking no action to stop this." She said that the pope still ignores the main problem: "the ongoing recklessness, deceit, and callousness of bishops who, even now, protect predators instead of children."

The executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference had an answer to the problem. "We believe that if women had a say in the church, if there was more accountability and more transparency, [then] the men would have been held more accountable."

The issue of sexual abuse by Catholic priests is so commonplace that it is the subject of late-night "humor."

Read the rest here.

This is simply despicable

MOSCOW - Russia threatened to suspend all child adoptions by U.S. families Friday after a 7-year-old boy adopted by a woman from Tennessee was sent alone on a one-way flight back to Moscow with a note saying he was violent and had severe psychological problems.

The boy, Artyom Savelyev, was put on a plane by his adopted grandmother, Nancy Hansen of Shelbyville.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the actions by the grandmother “the last straw” in a string of U.S. adoptions gone wrong, including three in which Russian children had died in the U.S.

Read the rest here.

All I can say is that as an American I am embarrassed. Actually as a human being I am embarrassed.