Official resigns over tainted milk
China’s product-quality chief resigned Monday as the government sought to contain a national crisis over tainted baby formula that has sickened 53,000 infants and implicated the country’s biggest dairy producers.
The official New China News Agency said without explanation that Li Changjiang had stepped down as director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
Li and his agency have been under fire since reports surfaced two weeks ago that milk powder made by the Sanlu Group was contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine. Since then, tests by the watchdog agency showed that formula from 22 dairy producers was tainted with the substance, which also was found in pet foods from China that killed dogs and cats last year in the U.S.
Li, 64, weathered a number of food and product safety scandals since taking charge of the agency in 2001, including one involving the deaths of at least 13 babies in 2004 after they drank fake powdered milk in Anhui province.
TOKYO
Nationalist elected prime minister
Taro Aso, an outspoken nationalist, was chosen Monday by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to become Japan’s third prime minister in less than two years.
Aso, 68, will replace Yasuo Fukada, who quit this month amid a lingering economic recession worsened by the recent Wall Street turmoil. Aso won in a landslide vote over several other candidates, including Yuriko Koike, the first woman to run for the nation’s highest office.
A career government official who studied at Stanford and in London, Aso has shrugged off criticism that he is too hawkish. For Japan’s Asian neighbors, his comments as foreign minister brought back uncomfortable memories of Japan’s military expansion half a century ago.
The grandson of a postwar prime minister, Aso emerges from the same nationalist school that urges Japan to be less apologetic about its imperial past and more assertive about its current global role.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil
Woman says she was McCain’s lover
A former model and ballerina is making headlines across Brazil after being identified as John McCain’s lover 51 years ago.
Maria Gracinda Teixeira, 77, says she is the woman the Republican presidential candidate fondly described – though never named – in his 1999 book “Faith of My Fathers.”
In the book, McCain said he met a “Brazilian fashion model” as a young Navy sailor in Rio de Janeiro when the destroyer USS Hunt docked in the city for a week in 1957.
Local reporters tracked her down late last week.
She declined requests for an interview Monday, but told Brazilian media last week that the young McCain was a romantic and a “good kisser.”