Chinese officials buy silence from grieving parents

Chinese officials are offering "hush money" to families who lost children in the May 12 earthquake, reports Edward Wong of The New York Times. "Local governments in southwest China’s quake-ravaged Sichuan Province have begun a coordinated campaign to buy the silence of angry parents whose children died during the earthquake, according to interviews with more than a dozen parents from four collapsed schools." More than 240 children died when schools collapsed during the earthquake. Many parents had raised concerns that the high death toll was due to corruption and negligent construction.