CHINA LEADERS WANT MORE BABIES BUT LOCAL EXECS RESIST

Facing a future demographic crisis and aging society, China’s leaders are desperately seeking to persuade couples to have more children. But bureaucrats don’t seem to have gotten the message, fining a couple in a recent widely publicized case for having a third child against the strict letter of the law. The move has sparked public outrage as people vent their anger at population control officials who are hungry for revenue and have long persecuted couples for violating the now-scrapped “one- child policy.” “The country is doing all it can to encourage childbirth but the local governments need money, so we end with this sort of madness,” a columnist and political commentator who writes under the name Lianpeng said on China’s Weibo microblogging service.