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If you have any vegetable products in your kitchen, youll want to be aware of the latest recall posted on the website of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The recall involves numerous vegetable products and fears that they could be a breeding ground for Clostridium botulinum bacterium, which can produce the deadly botulinum toxin. Heres what you need to know. Whats happened? On March 3, the FDA posted the notice of a voluntary recall from AKT Trading Inc. of Torrance, California. The recall was initiated after the company discovered that some of the prepared vegetable products manufactured by Choshiya Honten Co., Ltd had the potential to harbor the Clostridium botulinum bacterium. That bacterium can produce a toxin called botulinum, which can lead to a botulism infection in a person who consumes it. The reason the recalled products have the potential to harbor the potentially deadly bacterium is because the required “Keep Refrigerated” statement was left off the packaging. If the vegetables are not refrigerated, it could enable the bacterium to grow. Which products are affected? According to the FDA notice, the following products with the brand name Japanese Pickles, packaged in 1 lb plastic bags, are included in the recall: SHIBA ZUKE PREPARED MIX VEGETABLES, JAN CODE (UPC): 4582207535128, Expiration date: 8/27/2025 AOKAPPA ZUKE PREPARED MIX VEGETABLES, JAN CODE (UPC): 4582207535135, Expiration Date: 5/14/2025 FUKUSHIN ZUKE PREPARED MIX VEGETABLES, JAN CODE (UPC): 4582207535142, Expiration date: 7/9/2025, 5/31/2025 SOFT TSUBOZUKE PREPARED MIX VEGETABLES, JAN CODE (UPC): 4582207535159, Expiration Date: 7/29/2025 RAKKYO ZUKE PREPARED VEGETABLES, JAN CODE (UPC): 4983673526021, Expiration Date: 8/1/2025, 7/1/2025 Additionally, the following product is also included in the recall: Brand name: CHOSHIYA Product name: ABURA-ITAME ZHASAI PREPARED SICHUAN VEGETABLE Container: 8.8oz. plastic bag JAN CODE (UPC): 4983673527325 Expiration date: 4/3/2025, 2/25/2025 The products were distributed at Tokyo Central / Marukai stores in California. The full details of the recalled products can be found here. This recall follows an earlier recall of prepared bamboo shoots. The details of that earlier recall can be found here. What is botulism? According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), botulism is a rare but serious disease. The condition is caused by a toxin produced by Clostridium botulinum and other related bacteria. There are five types of botulism, including foodborne botulism, and all are medical emergencies. Botulism occurs when the toxin attacks the bodys nerves. This can lead to a number of issues, including muscle paralysis and difficulty breathing. It can even cause death. The CDC says that any form of botulism is a medical emergency that necessitates an immediate visit to your doctor or emergency room. What are the symptoms of botulism? Symptoms can vary depending on what type of botulism a person has. The CDC says symptoms related to all forms of botulism may include: Difficulty swallowing Muscle weakness Double vision Drooping eyelids Blurry vision Slurred speech Difficulty breathing Difficulty moving the eyes Foodborne botulism symptoms may also include: Vomiting Nausea Stomach pain Diarrhea And symptoms of botulism in an infant may also include: Constipation Poor feeding Drooping eyelids Pupils that are slow to react to light Face showing less expression than usual Weak cry that sounds different than usual What do I do if I have the recalled products? Do not consume them. Instead, the recalled products should be discarded or returned to their place of purchase for a refund. Full details of the recall can be found here. Consumers who have more questions can contact AKT Trading Inc. at 310-715-2174 or email the company at info@aktusa.com.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump’s long-threatened tariffs against Canada and Mexico went into effect Tuesday, putting global markets on edge and setting up costly retaliations by the United States’ North American allies.Starting just past midnight, imports from Canada and Mexico are now to be taxed at 25%, with Canadian energy products subject to 10% import duties.The 10% tariff that Trump placed on Chinese imports in February was doubled to 20%, and Beijing retaliated Tuesday with tariffs of up to 15% on a wide array of U.S. farm exports. It also expanded the number of U.S. companies subject to export controls and other restrictions by about two dozen.Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would slap tariffs on more than $100 billion of American goods over the course of 21 days. Mexico didn’t immediately detail any retaliatory measures.The U.S. president’s moves raised fears of higher inflation and the prospect of a devastating trade war even as he promised the American public that taxes on imports are the easiest path to national prosperity. He has shown a willingness to buck the warnings of mainstream economists and put his own public approval on the line, believing that tariffs can fix what ails the country.“It’s a very powerful weapon that politicians haven’t used because they were either dishonest, stupid or paid off in some other form,” Trump said Monday at the White House. “And now we’re using them.”The Canada and Mexico tariffs were supposed to begin in February, but Trump agreed to a 30-day suspension to negotiate further with the two largest U.S. trading partners. The stated reason for the tariffs is to address drug trafficking and illegal immigration, and both countries say they’ve made progress on those issues. But Trump has also said the tariffs will only come down if the U.S. trade imbalance closes, a process unlikely to be settled on a political timeline.The tariffs may be short-lived if the U.S. economy suffers. But Trump could also impose more tariffs on the European Union, India, computer chips, autos and pharmaceutical drugs. The American president has injected a disorienting volatility into the world economy, leaving it off balance as people wonder what he’ll do next.“It’s chaotic, especially compared to the way we saw tariffs rolled out in the first (Trump) administration,” said Michael House, co-chair of the international trade practice at the Perkins Coie law firm. “It’s unpredictable. We don’t know, in fact, what the president will do.”Democratic lawmakers were quick to criticize the tariffs, and even some Republican senators raised alarms.Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she’s “very concerned” about the tariffs going into effect because of her state’s proximity to Canada.“Maine and Canada’s economy are integrated,” Collins said, explaining that much of the state’s lobsters and blueberries are processed in Canada and then sent back to the U.S.The world economy is now caught in the fog of what appears to be a trade war.Even after Trump announced Monday that the tariffs were going forward, Canadian officials were still in touch with their U.S. counterparts.“The dialogue will continue, but we are ready to respond,” Canadian Defense Minister Bill Blair said in Ottawa as he went into a special Cabinet meeting on U.S.-Canada relations. “There are still discussions taking place.”Shortly after Blair spoke, Trudeau said Canada would impose 25% tariffs on $155 billion Canadian ($107 billion U.S.) worth of American goods, starting with tariffs on $30 billion Canadian ($21 billion U.S.) worth of goods immediately and on the remaining amount on American products in three weeks.“Our tariffs will remain in place until the U.S. trade action is withdrawn, and should U.S. tariffs not cease, we are in active and ongoing discussions with provinces and territories to pursue several non-tariff measures,” Trudeau said.The White House would like to see a drop in seizures of fentanyl inside the United States, not just on the northern and southern borders. Administration officials say that seizures of fentanyl last month in everywhere from Louisiana to New Jersey had ties to foreign cartels.Damon Pike, technical practice leader for customs and trade services at the tax and consulting firm BDO, suggested the responses of other countries could escalate trade tensions and possibly increase the economic pressure points.“Canada has their list ready,” Pike said. “The EU has their list ready. It’s going to be tit for tat.”The Trump administration has suggested inflation will not be as bad as economists claim, saying tariffs can motivate foreign companies to open factories in the United States. On Monday, Trump announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the computer chipmaker, would be investing $100 billion in domestic production.Still, it can take time to relocate factories spread across the world and train workers with the skills they need.Greg Ahearn, president and CEO of The Toy Association, said the 20% tariffs on Chinese goods will be “crippling” for the toy industry, as nearly 80% of toys sold in the U.S. are made in China.“There’s a sophistication of manufacturing, of the tooling,” he said. “There’s a lot of handcrafting that is part of these toys that a lot of people don’t understand the face painting, the face masks, the hair weaving, the hair braiding, the cut and sew for plush to get it to look just so. All of that are very high hands, skilled labor that has been passed through generations in the supply chain that exists with China.”For a president who has promised quick results, Ahearn added a note of caution about how quickly U.S. factories could match their Chinese rivals.“That can’t be replicated overnight,” he said. Gillies reported from Toronto. Associated Press writers Anne D’Innocenzio in New York and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report. Josh Boak, Paul Wiseman and Rob Gillies, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
As frustration with corporate power grows under the oligarch-friendly Trump administration, Mozilla Firefox stands out more than ever for at least one defining trait: It isnt owned by a giant tech company. We’re independent and nonprofit, Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers told Fast Company in an interview at Web Summit Qatar. We’re the only browser not backed by billionaires. But the nonprofit organization that broke Internet Explorers monopoly in Windows browsers 20 years ago isnt counting only on storytelling that we can do, she added. We’re also doing a lot of work on the product. Features getting filled out The first of a set of new features that Chambers describes as intended to help people navigate the Web more easily should ship in March. One cribs from a clever feature that Microsofts Edge added almost four years ago: an option to display open browser tabs in a column running down the left side of the browser window instead of in a row spanning the top. Neither Apples Safari nor Googles Chrome have seen fit to copy that since. A second sounds like the helpful quick-change tool Firefox offers to route a web search to the search engine of your choice: a sidebar tool that will let you switch between AI chatbots for quick queries that they can answer, hopefully without hallucination. Later in spring or summer, Mozilla plans to address a longstanding user request by shipping support for tab groups (for example, recipes or shopping) that you can create and then open or close as you need them. Safari in particular does this well, while Firefox users have had to install an extension to get a version of it. Another tab-management feature aimed at tab-overload victims like me (I had 76 open tabs open in this laptops copy of Firefox as I was writing this) will employ what sounds like on-device AI to organize tabs. Maybe more so than competitors like Google and Microsoft, Mozilla has been enlisting offline AI to avoid having to send any user data to the cloud. But its not always obvious when its new features work in that privacy-preserving way: I didnt know that Firefoxs page-translation feature worked on-device until I saw Chambers bring that up in a panel at Web Summits Doha conference. We should probably market that more, Chambers admits. A role for regulation But Mozilla says its already seeing increased adoption of its browserin Europe, where the EUs Digital Markets Act requires designated gatekeeper platforms to open mobile-device app stores and system defaults to potential competitors. In Europe, we grew Firefox share last year, which is the first time we’ve done it in a long time, Chambers said. Mozilla credits the DMAs choice screen, in which users pick a browser instead of having a system default waiting on their home screens, with goosing Firefox adoption in Android and iOSby 29% in Germany and France since the DMA went into effect last March. The underlying numbers remain low in third-party estimates, however. Cloudflares automated tracking puts Firefoxs mobile share at 1.3% in France and 2.7% in Germany, although Mozilla argues that Firefoxs tracking-prevention measures suppress those user counts. In the U.S., Cloudflare has Firefox at just .8%. Firefox has historically had higher share on Windows and Mac computers, where Cloudflare credits that browser with a 7.6% share worldwide, 21.5% in Germany, 14.6% in France, and 7.1% in the U.S. But its in the U.S. where government antitrust action may threaten Mozilla directly. The antitrust case that the federal government and almost every state attorney general successfully bought against Google over its search business practices could lead to a ban on Google paying other browsers to keep its search engine the default. Chambers would rather not see things come to that. The part that’s at risk is the U.S. revenue, she said. If our revenues were to be hurt through that, it would be much harder to sustain Gecko as an independent browser engine. A little engine that could Gecko, the open-source software framework inside Firefox that displays and animates pages, is the only major rendering engine that both runs on Windows and macOS and is not a Google project like the Blink open-source engine inside Chrome (employed by such indie, non-billionaire browser developers as Brave and the Browser Co). But Geckos third-place standing after Blink and Apples WebKit can lead to sites blocking the browserfor example, Formula 1s F1 TV brushes Firefox-using racing fans aside, telling them please switch to an alternative browser. Asked if life wouldnt be easier for Mozilla if it adopted WebKit, also open-source, Chambers said Mozilla has considered it but passed. It’s a lot of money and a lot of work to sustain an independent browser engine, she said. It also means we have a seat at the table with regulators, allowing Mozilla to advocate for causes like privacy. In iOS and iPadOS, Apple requires all U.S. third-party browsers to use the WebKit framework included in those mobile operating systems, which limits how third-party developers can differentiate their browsers from Apples Safari. Where Chambers points to Firefoxs speed relative to Chrome and Edge on Windows and to Safari on Macs (she did not mention how Apples browser also regularly lets individual pages devour system memory), her sales pitch for Firefox on an iPhone or iMac gets more evanescent: You’re supporting independent technology. New ventures In the past, Mozilla has tried to diversify its revenue by selling such add-on subscription products as a VPN service and Relay, a tool to create relay phone numbers and email addresses that mask your real ones. Its now reconsidering parts of that strategy, having already dumped some free-to-use services as Mozilla Social, its attempt to host a Mastodon instance. We’re not dialing it back, we’re working on different ways, said Chambers, adding that the company pulled back spend a little bit on promoting VPN, Relay and the Monitor data-breach-warning service. But last June, Mozilla also spent an unannounced sum to buy Anonym, an ad-tech firm founded to develop privacy-preserving online advertising systems that still let advertisers gauge what sales or other results came from their marketing efforts without snooping on individual shoppers. Chambers defends what might seem an unlikely alignment of a privacy-first browser with an adtech firm founded by former Meta executives as a way to keep online advertising alive in a way that web readers wont resent. The big technology that they use is differential privacy, which creates enough noise into the system so that it’s anonymous, she said, mentioning both some of the really big ad platforms and companies in health and financial services (both sectors already subject to privacy regulation) are expressing interest. (Another Google antitrust case, the lawsuit brought the U.S. and most states against Google over its display-ads business, may help crack open that market for Mozilla.) This openness to new business models led Mozilla to write the terms-of-service document that Firefox had never had. The company posted those terms on Wednesday and then faced enough blowback that it posted a follow-up addressing user anxiety in a few areas, such as the removal of a pledge never to sell data that Mozilla apparently felt could not be made without risking conflict with some of the vaguer privacy statutes around the world. Getting people to accept online advertising systems that make enough money to allow subscription-free reading across the web remains complicated, even for a company with a solid track record on privacy. But for Mozilla to keep working on that, Chambers has a simpler request of regulators. All that we ask for is that people are given a choice, she said. We don’t need it to be a preferential choice, they just need a choice.
Category:
E-Commerce
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