17 August 2007

Think of it as another "Long March"

If the Chinese weren't already a nation of atheists, they'd be thinking God was out to get them.
-- THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- A chain of Dutch bed stores said it is recalling more than 1,300 Chinese-made foam mattresses amid fears they were sprayed with toxic insecticide.

Beter Bed Holding announced the recall after tests on a shipping container holding more than 700 mattresses found they contained poison, possibly as a result of being sprayed to kill insects in wooden packaging.
And who exactly is in charge of Quality Control... the Red Army?
"You can do that with solid stuff, but not of course with food, textiles, stuff people sleep on," Beter Bed spokesman Richard Neve said. "If you put a chemical compound on a (foam) sleeping mattress, like a sponge it fills itself up."
Sometimes you just can't win for losing.
Ironically, the spraying may have been part of a Chinese move to ensure exports were not infected.
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RELATED: Poison, theft... what's the big deal?
When a friend complimented Niagara winemaker Allan Schmidt for successfully cracking the icewine market in mainland China, Schmidt dismissed it: He wasn't selling his wine in China, he said.

Then the friend gave him a link to a website. Schmidt was stunned.

There, a Chinese company was selling a product called Vineland icewine, boasting of a joint venture with a Canadian partner and, to top it all off, using a panoramic view of Schmidt's own winery on its Web page.

"They'd taken it right off our website," Schmidt says in a telephone interview. "I was upset."

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