US approved thousands of child bride requests
WASHINGTON: Thousands of requests by men to bring in child and adolescent brides to live in the US were approved over the past decade, according to government data obtained by AP.
The approvals are legal as the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t set minimum age requirements. In weighing petitions for spouses or fiancees, US Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and whether the marriage would be legal in the state where the petitioner lives.
The data raises questions about whether the immigration system may be enabling forced marriage and how US laws may be compounding the problem. Marriage between adults and minors is common in the US, and most states allow children to marry with some restrictions.
There were more than 5,000 cases of adults petitioning on behalf of minors and nearly 3,000 examples of minors seeking to bring in older spouses or fiances. BEIJING: China on Friday broadcast pictures taken by its rover and lander on the moon’s far side, in what its space programme hailed as another triumph for the groundbreaking mission to the less-understood sector of the lunar surface.
The pictures on CCTV showed the Jade Rabbit 2 rover and the Chang’e 4 spacecraft that transported it on the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon, which always faces away from Earth. The pictures were transmitted by a relay satellite to a control centre in Beijing.
CHINA, US SHARED DATA IN LUNAR MISSION
Space officials from China and the US have exchanged information for the mission, the first such collaboration since the 2011 US law banning space exchanges with Beijing, a China Daily report said. Space authorities from two sides have been discussing cooperation in lunar and deep-space exploration since the second half of last year.