For many weeks now, China has been facing a huge bad press in terms of tainted milk. For quite some time now, many manufacturers in China have been trying to make additional profit by adding melamine to milk (with the same milk being used as baby milk, and as part of milk products such as ice cream, sweets, candies, etc). This caused deaths in China, and led to a large scale removal of such products from store shelves in countries around the globe, along with a lot of outrage. China responded as it does, by blaming foreign media for hurting Chinese interests by excessive coverage, as well as by arresting a whole host of people responsible. However, it still did not answer the fundamental questions that came out it with regard to manufacturers feeling that they had the freedom to add a substance such as melamine (used in plastics, and nowhere close to anything used in food grade items) without any kind of inspection (or maybe the inspectors were all bought off).

continue reading "The tainted food scandal in China worsens"

Oil prices have been steadily moving up for the past couple of years, and even with the overall low rate of taxes on gasoline in the United States (as compared to the most countries where the taxes are much higher), gas prices are now upwards of $3.5 per gallon, and the pain is very high for a country where the car is the primary means of transport for a majority of its citizens.
Previously, the sales figures for gas-guzzling SUV’s and pickup trucks were high, high enough to worry most people trying to reduce the oil consumption in the US, and most so for environmentalists and global warming experts who worried about the higher rate of oil consumption in the transport sector. There has always been an alternative, even in the previous oil shocks of 1973 and 1980, people moved towards more fuel-efficient smaller cars; but this shift was only temporary and people would move back to the gas guzzlers when oil moved down (and hence the overall success of the hummer, a vehicle that drinks gasoline rather than running on it). However, recent trends seem to indicate that the sales of smaller fuel-efficient cars is on the rise:

continue reading "High oil prices moves Americans towards smaller cars"