China’s dairy giants opened their factories to a government-led media tour in a bid to stave off losses and regain the public’s trust after their products were found tainted with a chemical that killed four infants and sickened tens of thousands.
Executives from Mengniu Dairy Group Co and Yili Industrial Group Co — both based in Inner Mongolia, where sprawling grasslands serve as grazing land to some 2.5 million cows — promised on Thursday that stepped up testing and new procedures would ensure that similar contamination won’t happen again.
Together the companies control more than half of China’s dairy market.
“Provide 100 percent safety to consumers,” read a slogan on a red banner in the spotless processing and packaging hall at Yili’s headquarters in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia.
The media tour on Thursday was part of a joint effort by the government and the dairy industry to contain the fallout after baby formula contaminated with melamine was blamed for the deaths of four infants and the sickening of about 54,000 other children in China.
The Health Ministry said on Wednesday that 5,800 children were still hospitalized — six of them in serious condition.
Authorities blame middlemen at milk collecting stations for the food safety scandal that began last month, saying they added melamine to watered-down milk to fool quality control tests and make the product appear rich in protein.
Nitrogen-rich melamine, a chemical used to make plastics and fertilizers, can cause kidney stones as the body tries to eliminate it and, in extreme cases, lead to life-threatening kidney failure.
Infants are particularly susceptible.
At Yili headquarters, reporters were shown a new station for melamine testing where workers wearing lab coats and gloves used testing equipment they said cost the company US$15 million to import from the US and Japan.
“After this incident, we have increased melamine checks on all raw milk supplies [and] only that which passes the tests goes into the factory,” Yili executive president Zhang Jianqiu (張劍秋) said. “All of Yili’s products on the markets for sale ... meet the standards.”
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
Myanmar yesterday published a parliamentary bill proposing the death sentence for those who detain or violently coerce people into working in online scam centers. Internet fraud factories have flourished in Myanmar, part of Southeast Asia’s scam economy, targeting Internet users worldwide with romance and cryptocurrency investment cons. The multibillion-dollar black market attracts many willing employees, but repatriated foreigners have also reported being trafficked to sites in Myanmar and tortured by scam center operators. The draft legislation would allow capital punishment for “violence, torture, unlawful arrest and detention, or cruel treatment against another person for the purpose of forcing them to commit online scams.” The
RSS