Society

China's food safety situation is still grim, although some improvements have been made in the wake of a scandal last year that killed at least six babies and made another 300,000 sick, the Health Ministry said Monday.

The comments from the ministry came after China's legislature enacted a tough food safety law Saturday, promising tougher penalties for makers of tainted products. Several food scares in recent years have exposed serious flaws in monitoring of the nation's food supply.

"At present, China's food security situation remains grim, with high risks and contradictions popping out," the ministry said in a news release, adding that it cannot afford "even the slightest relaxation over supervision."

The law, which was five years in the making, consolidates hundreds of disparate regulations and standards covering China's 500,000 food processing companies.

It pays special attention to the issue of food additives that lay at the heart of last year's scandal involving infant formula produced by the Sanlu dairy and other companies. No additives will be allowed unless they can be proven both necessary and safe, according to the law, which goes into effect June 1.

China's government has been trying to restore confidence in the country's food supply ever since revelations in September that formula was contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine. The tainted milk is blamed for the deaths and illnesses in the babies.

This guy bids via phone in Christie for looted bronzes.

Below are details from Yahoo.com

A Chinese art collector revealed himself as the man behind the winning bids for two imperial bronzes auctioned at Christie's over Beijing's objections, then announced he had no intention of paying the $36 million.

The audacious act of commercial sabotage exposes the tensions China and other countries, such as Greece and Egypt, face in trying to recover cultural objects plundered in war or stolen. One overseas expert in looted relics called the fake bids "brilliant" — a ploy likely to be copied in future disputed sales.

The bogus bids were the latest attempt by both the Chinese government and private citizens to block the sale of the pieces, which disappeared when French and British forces sacked and burned the imperial Summer Palace outside Beijing in 1860 at the end of the second Opium War. Chinese view the devastation of the palace as a national humiliation.

Auction house owner Cai Mingchao said Monday he put in telephone bids for the bronze rat and rabbit heads — part of a collection owned by the late French designer Yves Saint Laurent — during last week's auction in Paris. The three-day sale set a record for the most valuable private collection sold at auction, bringing more than $484 million.

"What I need to stress is that this money cannot be paid," Cai told a news conference in Beijing. "At the time, I was thinking that any Chinese would do this if they could ... I only did what I was obliged to."

Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent's longtime partner, told France-Info radio that he was not altogether surprised by the maneuver since he believes "the Chinese would have done anything to try to get back the pieces."

Berge said he would keep the bronzes if Cai doesn't pay up.

An official with Christie's in Paris on Monday confirmed the bronzes were still in the auction house's possession but would not give details. The official was not authorized to be publicly named, according to company policy.

Actually paying for the bronzes would equal paying ransom, some Chinese have said.

Cai's fake bids drew praise for patriotism, but others said the move could sink his career. Attempts to reach him after the news conference were unsuccessful.

The Chinese government said Monday it had nothing to do with the bids. The government had tried to stop the sale, saying the bronzes should be returned instead. Christie's stood by its right to sell them, and a French court rejected a Chinese group's petition to block the sale.

"I can't speak to the legalities of this collector's actions, but it is a brilliant move that is likely to be copycatted and has thrown a wrench in the market," said Lawrence Rothfield, author of the forthcoming book "The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum" and professor at the University of Chicago's Cultural Policy Center.

"But it is important to recognize that dealers and museums have made it easier for countries to demand repatriation of artifacts stolen many decades ago because they have not cleaned up their act," Rothfield added.

Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the London-based Art Loss Register, which maintains the world's largest database on stolen, missing and looted art, said China had a moral claim to the bronzes, but not a legal one.

"Legally there is no question that the French are in the right," he said. "Items taken by Napoleon to fill the Louvre, items taken in the 1860s — there is no question, those cannot legally be reclaimed by China. However, there is a moral and political dimension to this."

He said the latest development was a "publicity campaign" that may make it easier to come to a settlement with Berge and Christie's.

"Any activity like this does tend to cast a taint over the provenance of the item, which makes people think twice before attempting to buy it," he said.

In a statement, Christie's said, "We are aware of today's news reports. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on the identity of our consignors or buyers, nor do we comment or speculate on the next steps that we might take in this instance."

Cai's fake bids apparently were made in cooperation with China's Lost Cultural Relics Recovery Program, a group dedicated to repatriating looted Chinese art. On its Web site, the group describes itself as a non-governmental cultural body set up by collectors and scholars, and Cai serves as an adviser.

"This is an extraordinary method taken in an extraordinary situation, which successfully stopped the auction," the group's vice director, Niu Xianfeng, said at the press conference. If the bids are voided, the group won't do anything in response, Niu said.

China has intensified efforts to retrieve looted relics. When official protests against similar auctions failed, state-owned companies and rich Chinese individuals have stepped in to buy the pieces.

However, China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage put out a statement discouraging private collectors from buying the bronzes and returning them to China. The agency said Monday it had no idea about plans for a bogus bid.

"We did not know about this until the news conference this morning," said a woman who answered the phone at the administration. She declined to give her name, in line with official policy. "The people and the fund have absolutely no connections with us."

The stunt was admirable but too extreme, said Wang Linmao, a history professor at Zhejiang University who specializes in the late Qing period — the era when the imperial palace was sacked.

"It is now almost as if every time a looted Chinese relic gets auctioned overseas, Chinese people feel compelled to buy it back," Wang said. "I don't think this should be the case. It is a good thing if we can get them back, because it is about washing off the 100-year national humiliation. But it's not like we have to buy them back at all costs."

Chinese courts are now ready to accept lawsuits by families of children sickened in last year's tainted milk scandal, state media said Tuesday, quoting a top official.

The report in the newspaper China Daily follows months of delays in which lawyers for plaintiffs told AFP they were warned not to sue over the scandal, which embarrassed China by exposing chronic holes in food-safety mechanisms.

A senior judicial official said courts were now accepting cases from families who had rejected compensation offers from milk companies involved in the scandal, the newspaper said.

"A small number of the infant victims' parents have not accepted the government-led compensation and have prepared pleas," it quoted Shen Deyong, executive vice-president of the Supreme People's Court, as saying.

"The people's courts (at various levels) have prepared for the work. They will accept the compensation cases according to the law."

At least six infants died and nearly 300,000 were sickened last year by milk powder contaminated by the industrial chemical melamine, which was added to milk supplies to give the appearance of a higher protein content.

A court in eastern China's Shandong province has accepted legal documents from 54 families whose infants developed urinary illnesses from baby milk powder made by Syrutra International Inc., a lawyer told AFP.

"Before this, the court would accept no materials that we sent to them. The court would not reply to us or accept the lawsuit," a Beijing-based lawyer in the case, Li Jinglin, told AFP.

However, he said there was no guarantee the court in the coastal city of Qingdao would take the case.

The company is a Sino-US joint venture, China Daily said.

China Daily also said a court in the northern city of Shijiazhuang had recently contacted lawyers representing 117 families in the city to discuss their cases.

The families want to sue Sanlu -- one of China's biggest dairy producers and the company at the centre of the scandal -- which is based in Shijiazhuang.

The scandal caused kidney stones in thousands of infants who were fed tainted baby milk powder, with those who died succumbing to kidney failure.

More about Sanlu scandle President of Sanlu group in trail

In Liuzhou's downtown, Guangxi province, a hospital was taken down by directional blasting on 2009.02.27.

This hospital consisted of three buildings, one 10-storied building with two 8-storied buildings on both sides, about 120meters in length and 14metes in width.

According to the latest plan, another landmark building will be laid here.