Hong Kong expands food tests

BY MIN LEE

Hong Kong

Oct. 26: The discovery of excessive levels of the industrial chemical melamine in Chinese eggs has prompted the Hong Kong authorities to expand health tests to include meat products imported from China, a senior official said on Sunday. The move follows the announcement that Hong Kong testers had found 4.7 parts per million of melamine in imported eggs produced by a division of China’s Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group.

The legal limit for melamine in foodstuffs in Hong Kong is 2.5 ppm. Hong Kong secretary for food and health York Chow said the melamine may have come from feed given to the chickens that laid the eggs. —AP

***

Taliban gouge out eyes of a farmer

Kandahar, Oct. 26: Suspected Taliban militants gouged out the eyes of an Afghan farmer after accusing him of spying for international forces and the government, an official alleged on Sunday.

Helmand province farmer Sayed Ghulam said his eyes had been removed with a knife on Thursday, as his family watched, although he would not say who was responsible.

Armed men knocked on the door of his home in Sangin district and when he opened, they had dragged him outside, said the farmer from his hospital bed in the southern city of Kandahar. "About 20 metres (yards) away from my house, they held my hands and took out my eyes with a knife. It was very painful and the world turned black," he said, a bandage across his eyes.

"They only said, ‘You vicious man’," he said when asked why this had been done. "My kids and wife were watching when they did it. They were screaming." Mr Ghulam would not say who his attackers were. Provincial government spokesperson Daud Ahmadi blamed Taliban militants.

—AFP