Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

Another victim...

The milk scandal in China is possibly  hitting the consumer confidence there harder than expected. Dairy products from milk to ice cream are all found to be contaminated.

The white rabbit creamy lolly has been one of the most popular lolly in China, and has been found of being contaminated by melamine.

Most people born between 70s - 90s in China, including myself, consumed the "white rabbit" at some stage of their lives. I even brought it once here in New Zealand - they are more than lollies, they are ... how should I put this, a kind of your childhood memory.

If this brand also falls in the scandal, I really don't know what food is actually safe in China - I can assure you that this is not an isolated food safety case. People deliberately add all sorts chemicals to nearly every type of food, and we've been eating those everyday.

This country needs to have a serious consideration on its economic development policy - it just CANNOT override other things like food safety - enough is enough.

Winston and others from now...

If nothing goes wrong, the vote of censure on Peters is expected to pass later today, which marks the new low Mr Winston Peters has sunken into.

So the vital question for both major party is, can Winston hang on?

NZ First's poll usually moves between 1 - 3% in last month, which isn't enough to help it to gets back to the partliament.

The Tauranga Electorate looks bad for Winston as well. In Augest he was 20% behind the National rival. I haven't see a recent poll but I won't be surprised to see a wider gap between the two.

However, the new website, iPredict, has a different result. The majority of people think that NZ First will win at least 4%.

But in my opinion, this parliament is the last one that we'll see Peters in it. The poll in Tauranga not only shows that people there have moved on, it is also a nationwide trend.

John Key has made a smart move by distancing himself from Peters. I think Labour should consider to do the same now. Wonder if they ever played that game called "mafia", if your mafia buddy will be definitely vote dead by majority, it's actually better to vote FOR his death to disguise yourself. So instead of live in the fading hope believing that you'll get re-elected, Labour should do the right thing now by stop providing useless protection to Mr Peters.

So a smart move for Labour today would be, give at least half of its vote fore the censure or to let each MP vote for themselves. You need to at least show people that this case was not decided on a political ground.

4 dead, director arrested.

Questions still remain for the contaminated milk powder scandal. How melamine got into the baby milk powder is still a bit of mystery, although Chinese police has arrested several dairy farmers, alleging them of adding that chemical to the raw milk.

But melamine is almost insolvent to water. If it was added in the raw milk stage, it is hard to believe that San Lu does not have any knowledge on it, as the precipitation will almost occur in the milk.

San Lu, the producer has a motive to add melamine to the milk in the production stage because it gives the end product a false high protein reading. But this possibility is not publicly investigated at the moment.

Just some facts you may be interested to know ...

• Melamine was later found in varies milk powder products, including some reputable Chinese brand.
• However, San Lu's product got an extremely high reading (2000+ mg/kg), compare with 100 or less mg/kg in other products)
• Only one type of  San Lu milk powder product was found to be "contaminated".  It is the cheapest of its type in the market.
• San Lu products were granted exemption from state quality surveillance inspection because of its "excellent performance".

So did San Lu or dairy farmers deliberately added melamine into the milk powder? In my opinion, the short answer is yes, with a long answer "no". San Lu, like nearly everybody else, adds bit of high tech stuff like melamine into their products. But there's no need to boost protein % by add 2000+ mg/kg melamine, so something must gone wrong in the process, which probably San Lu's QCs have no knowledge of.

contaminated milk powder

I just need to turn your attention to China.  Since last month, babies in several Chinese provinces fall ill after long time consumption of Sanlu baby powder. Most babies have stones in their kidneys, and several were confirmed died of this cause.

The milk powder was found contaminated with a chemical called melamine .It is mainly used to made plastic materials, but there are previous cases that some businesses have used this chemical to get the protein level for their product to appear higher as is rich in nitrogen. So you cannot rule out the possibility that somebody, or the Sanlu itself, deliberately added the chemcial into the powder.

The sign of "contamination" appeared as early as march this year, but there was not public reaction from any party, including fonterra, until last week when all the contamination chemicals have been recalled.

Sanlu, a Chinese based company, is partially owned by Fonterra (43%). I don't think there is a need for me to explain what Fonterra is to New Zealand readers.

Fonterra's involvement in this issue is still not very clear. As far as I understand, the contaminated milk powder was processed from 100% Chinese produced materials, i.e. no New Zealand materials were used.

But that's far from enough, I want to know whether Fonterra knew anything before the contamination made public, whether they have done enough to stop contaminated milk powder from entering the market.

According to today's New Zealand Herald Report, the answer from Fonterra, is yes ... which I don't believe in. I want to get independent report on Fonterra's involvement, and it really sickens me that PM and trade minister defended Fonterra before the investigation - what would them react if more than 500 New Zealand baby were poisoned by milk powder made by a company with 43% of shares owned by Chinese?

none of them is/are?

This phrase jumped out of my mind twice today, one in my last blog: (earthquake) none of them was/were destructive, and one in my assignment: none of them is/are up to the standard.

Asked several native speakers and non-natives, none of them (damn again) was/were certain on this, but most people preferred the "are" option.

... which I don't agree with. It just sounds strange, at least I think the word "none" just means "not one", so in "not one of them", "not one" is the subject?

But Google seems to be in favour of the "are" option as well. "none of them are" returned 5,150,000 results, compare with 805,000 results from the phrase "none of them is".

Well I'll follow the crowd then. But I agree with this thread, "none of them is" is the correct way (grammatically); when people say "none of them are", what they really mean is "not many are".

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UPDATE

Another person pointed out a different way of look into this issue. In the example of "none of them is/are the prime minister of New Zealand", "is" is clearly the right answer. But if you change that example to past tense - "were" seems to be the right answer.

I guess it really depends on what follows after that phrase?

An unpleasant reminder

Today is exactly four month after the 8.0Ms earthquake which killed more than 80,000 people in Sichuan Province, China.

Aftershocks were seem to be finally dying out in just few weeks ago. But If a demon like creature really exist, it sure knows when to come out - there were at least 3 M 4.0+ aftershocks recorded since yesterday, the largest one happened early this morning, measured Mb 5.4 in northern part of Sichuan Province.

And my friends and family members in the province also reported countless number of small shocks - none of them were destructive, but sure reminded people what was happened four month ago.

Those aftershocks really worried me. The epicentre of one aftershock yesterday was only about 50km from the provincial capital, Chengdu(pop ~11m. , 4m. metropolitan), being the closest so far(it was first reported of being only 30km from Chengdu).

If a strong aftershock happens in the area the consequences would be catastrophic ... given that most people are tired of aftershocks and no one bothers to walk out of buildings when an aftershock happens.

The biggest one, Mb 5.4 this morning,  depth of that earthquake was only 6 km below the surface - it's an extremely shallow yet relatively strong quake, and I'm glad that the magnitude wasn't anything higher than 5.5. The region just cannot bear that kind of shallow quake again.