Henan

BEIJING - It was reality television in the extreme. Chinese state television Friday broadcast live images of the last moments of four foreign drug traffickers who were about to be executed for the 2011 killings of 13 Chinese fishermen on the Mekong River. Although the cameras pulled away before the lethal injections, the coverage was unprecedented, unleashing a storm of criticism and debate about the death penalty. Psychologists decried the coverage as distressing to children.

BEIJING - For members of a doomsday cult in China, the end may indeed be near. Authorities have in recent weeks arrested more than 100 members of a fringe Christian-inspired group known as Almighty God that is prophesying the world will end Dec. 21, according to state media. Members of the group had been distributing apocalyptic literature and sending text messages throughout China when the government began detaining them this month. On Dec. 8, police arrested 34 members in Fujian province, which lies on China's southeastern coast. On Thursday, they arrested 37 members, including seven leaders in Xining, a city in the west-central province of Qinghai.

As a child growing up in Kaifeng in central China, Jin Jin was constantly reminded of her unusual heritage. "We weren't supposed to eat pork, our graves were different from other people, and we had a mezuza on our door," said the 25-year-old, referring to the prayer scroll affixed to doorways of Jewish homes. Her father told her of a faraway land called Israel that he said was her rightful home, she recalls. But "we didn't know anything about daily prayers or the weekly reading of the Torah.

They came here looking for treatment, they said, some way to get better, feel stronger. But they also came to talk about the scourge that has turned their lives into burdens, children into orphans and their village into what one doctor calls a "combat zone." The scourge is AIDS. And it is laying waste to small pockets of China's most populous province, Henan, among poor farmers who knew little or nothing about the disease when they were first infected through tainted blood.

Chinese police have raided brick factories scattered through a rural swath of Henan province and rescued 30 mentally disabled men who authorities say had been held as slave laborers. The unusually public raids Monday were prompted by a report on Henan provincial television by a journalist who had gone undercover posing as a disabled man at a train station, where he was grabbed by a recruiter and says he was sold to a brick factory. The case is an embarrassment for Chinese authorities, who have promised to stamp out slavery and the abuse of the disabled.

Chinese officials says a blast in a coal mine has killed 35 in central Henan province and left 44 other miners trapped. The State Administration of Work Safety said the predawn explosion today happened at a pit in Pingdingshan city. A statement on the administration's website did not give a cause for the blast. It said 14 miners managed to flee to safety. Ninety-three men were working underground at the time of the blast, it said. China's mines are the world's deadliest.

BEIJING - For a 25-year-old computer whiz enlisted in a People's Liberation Army hacking unit, life was all about low pay, drudgery and social isolation. Nothing at all like the unkempt hackers of popular imagination, the young man wore a military uniform at work in Shanghai. He lived in a dorm where meals often consisted of instant ramen noodles. The workday ran from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., although hackers were often required to work late into the evening. With no money and little free time, he found solace on the Internet.

A classroom collapsed at a rural school in Henan province in central China, killing 11 preschoolers and injuring 35, the official China Daily reported.

An overcrowded bus and a train collided in China's central Henan province, killing 16 people and injuring 35.

More than 600 people, including Communist Party officials, have been arrested in a crackdown on gambling in northern China, the provincial newspaper Henan Daily said.