Chinese regulators announced stepped up food safety inspections yesterday ahead of the country’s biggest holiday, Lunar New Year, in continuing efforts to crack down on the poorly regulated manufacturing industry.
Inspectors will target supermarkets, restaurants and food additive producing factories in seven provinces, including Hebei, the heart of last year’s melamine-tainted milk scandal, Health Ministry spokesman Mao Qun’an said.
“We’ll seriously check for illegal substances and additives in food and will severely punish companies or individuals who violate the law,” Mao said at a news conference.
The week-long Lunar New Year holiday, also known as the Spring Festival, starts on Jan. 26 and is usually celebrated with family gatherings and sumptuous feasts.
The campaign is the latest step by China’s authorities to improve the country’s shoddy food safety record.
The manufacturing industry has been shaken by recurring scandals, including one last year where hundreds of thousands of children were sickened by milk contaminated by the industrial chemical melamine.
Authorities accuse suppliers of watering down the milk and then adding nitrogen-rich melamine to make it seem higher in protein when tested.
Mao said yesterday that the latest government figures show 296,000 babies were sickened and almost 53,000 were hospitalized. The deaths of six babies have also been linked to the scandal.
Last month, the government released a list of banned substances in an attempt to weed out the practice of augmenting food products with nonfood additives.
Among the 17 banned substances was boric acid, commonly used as an insecticide, which is mixed with noodles and meatballs to increase elasticity. Also forbidden was industrial formaldehyde and lye, used in making soap and drain cleaner and added to water used to soak some types of dried seafood to make the products appear fresher and bigger.
Various industrial dyes used to improve the appearance of food products, ranging from chili powder to tea to cooked meats, were also prohibited.
Even so, it’s an uphill task because of murky supply chains and numerous small, sometimes illegally operated establishments, which are hard to monitor.
State media has said officially there are about 500,000 food processors and 70 percent have fewer than 10 employees.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS