Sixteen policemen were killed by unidentified assailants in Kashgar, in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang region of China. Another sixteen officers were wounded in the attack, in which two attackers drove a lorry into the station. The government of the People’s Republic of China has repeatedly warned of unrest leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Xinhua News Agency reports that the attackers drove a dump truck into the police officers during the officers’ morning exercise at about 8:00 am local time (0:00 GMT), then threw grenades into the police barracks and attacked with knives. The BBC reports that fourteen of the police deaths occurred at the scene, with two more dying en route to hospital. They also report one of the alleged attackers received a leg injury. The attackers were arrested, according to police.
After they were arrested by the police, the assailants were described as being 28 and 33, and of the Uyghur minority, a Turkish speaking people who reside primarily in the Xinjiang region. The police found an additional 10 explosives in the truck as well as what was described as a “home-made gun.”
The autonomous Xinjiang region of China is a large, sparsely-populated territory in the north-west of the country. The population includes many groups, but the largest is the Turkic peoples including the largely Muslim Uyghurs. Kashgar is an oasis city at an important junction of trade routes, near China’s western borders, and was a part of the historic “Silk Road.”
A 21-year-old New Zealander, who has not been named, was sexually assaulted by another man early yesterday morning (NZDT) in Wellington, New Zealand. The New Zealand police have described the sexual attack as “prolonged and terrifying”.
The man was first threatened with a weapon at a shopping center located in Riddiford Street, Newtown, Wellington and was then forced into a dark and isolated carpark where the sexual attack occurred.
Detective Sergeant Zane Smith, said that they have been given a very good description of the attacker and with that description have released an identikit picture. The attacker is a male M?ori aged between mid-20s and early 30s, measures around 1.8 metres and has a solid build. The most identifiable feature is a M?ori tattoo located on his chin. The attacker was also wearing a ‘50 Cent‘ green hooded top, faded black baggy jeans and was wearing sneakers coloured red and white.
The attacker has still not been found and police are asking for anyone who may have been in the Riddiford Street shopping centre between 2:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m.
Brockie as Oderus Urungus in 2004.Image: Mark Marek.
The surviving members of satirical metal band GWAR yesterday announced a charitable arts foundation in the name of Dave Brockie. Brockie, 50, died last month.
Founding frontman and singer Brockie spent 30 years leading “Earth’s only openly extra-terrestrial rock band”, which actually hailed from Richmond, Virginia. Their obscene lyrics and theatrical live shows brought fame to Brockie, who went by stage name Oderus Urungus, and the fellow Virginia Commonwealth University art students that made up the band.
GWAR unveiled the foundation in a video statement yesterday. Amongst the stated aims are providing support to artists who cannot acquire funds via traditional routes and “the advancement of music, images, letters and performances in the arts”. The foundation is also to preserve Brockie’s body of work and promote his legacy.
“We would like to thank fans and friends for their outpouring of love”, the band said.
A public memorial for Brockie is scheduled for August 15, and the annual GWAR-B-Q is to go ahead the next day. Drawing a line between the stage persona and the man who played it, the band add “Just face it — Oderus would order you to be present and pay tribute to Dave Murray Brockie, his own personal slave!”
Donations can be made at the GWAR-B-Q and via GWAR’s website. The rubber-costumed band remains to publicly decide if they will continue to perform and record. They say the foundation’s first task will be to fund and erect a monument “to provide the world with a place to pay respects to the memory of a very cherished man”.
Members of Australia’s Health Services Union (HSU) will go on strike in Victoria next week in a dispute over stalled wage and career structure negotiations. Over 5000 physiotherapists, speech pathologists and radiation therapists will walk off the job next week, effectively closing the state’s 68 largest health services.
The strike will force the closure of intensive care units and emergency departments across the state.
It is feared the strike could continue into Easter.
National secretary of the HSU, Kathy Jackson said admissions would be crippled, while intensive care patients would have to be evacuated to New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia as hospitals will not be able to perform tests or administer treatment.
“When an ambulance shows up you can’t admit a patient without an X-ray being available, you can’t intubate them and you can’t operate on them,” she said.
“If something goes wrong in an ICU you need to be able to X-ray, use nuclear medicine or any diagnostic procedure,” said Ms Jackson.
Ms Jackson said the HSU offered arbitration last year, but the state government refused. “They’re not interested in settling disputes, they hope that we are just going to go away.”
“We’re not going away, we’ve gone back and balloted the whole public health workforce in Victoria, those ballots were successful, 97 percent approval rating,” she said.
The HSU is urging the government to commence serious negotiations to resolve the dispute before industrial action commenced.
The government has offered the union a 3.25 per cent pay increase, in line with other public sector workers but the union has demanded more, but stopped short of specifying a figure.
Victorian PremierJohn Brumby said the claim would be settled according to the government’s wages policy. “The Government is always willing and wanting to sit down and negotiate with the relevant organisations . . . we have a wages policy based around an increase of 3.25 per cent and, above that, productivity offset,” he told parliament.
The union claims it is also arguing against a lack of career structure, which has caused many professionals to leave the health service. Ms Jackson said wages and career structures in Victoria were behind other states.
Victorian Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said he was not in support of the proposed strike and called on the government to meet with unions. “There could not be a more serious threat to our health system than has been announced today.”
“We now have to do whatever is possible to stop this strike from proceeding,” he said.
The opposition leader will meet with the union at 11:30 AM today.
Victorian Hospitals Industry Association industrial relations services manager Simon Chant said hospitals were looking at the possible impact and warned that patients may have to be evacuated interstate if the strike goes ahead.
Fears of contaminated bone and skin grafts are being felt by unsuspecting patients following the revelation that funeral homes may have been looting corpses.
Janet Evans of Marion, Ohio was told by her surgeon, “The bone grafts you got might have been contaminated”. She reacted with shock, “I was flabbergasted because I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I didn’t know I got a bone graft until I got this call. I just thought they put in screws and rods.”
The body of Alistair Cooke, the former host of Masterpiece Theatre, was supposedly looted along with more than 1,000 others, according to two law enforcement officials close to the case. The tissue taken was typically skin, bone and tendon, which was then sold for use in procedures such as dental implants and hip replacements. According to authorities, millions of dollars were made by selling the body parts to companies for use in operations done at hospitals and clinics in the United States and Canada.
A New Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services, has reportedly been taking body parts from funeral homes across Brooklyn, New York. According to ABC News, they set up rooms like a “surgical suite.” After they took the bones, they replaced them with PVC pipe. This was purportedly done by stealth, without approval of the deceased person or the next of kin. 1,077 bodies were involved, say prosecutors.
Investagators say a former dentist, Michael Mastromarino, is behind the operation. Biomedical was considered one of the “hottest procurement companies in the country,” raking in close to $5 million. Eventually, people became worried: “Can the donors be trusted?” A tissue processing company called LifeCell answered no, and issued a recall on all their tissue.
Cooke’s daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, said, “To know his bones were sold was one thing, but to see him standing truncated before me is another entirely.” Now thousands of people around the country are receiving letters warning that they should be tested for infectious diseases like HIV or hepatitis. On February 23, the Brooklyn District Attorney indicted Mastromarino and three others. They are charged with 122 felony counts, including forgery and bodysnatching.
This article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation, one of its projects, or people related to it. Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Satire site Uncyclopedia, a parody of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has been labeled by the Malaysian government as dangerous. The Internal Security Department of Malaysia issued the warning today, saying that the site has “messages and information insulting Malaysia”.
The warning notes the creation date of the website as being 5 January 2005, and hosted by Wikia, Inc., both of which are correct. However, it claims Wikia owns Wikipedia; Wikipedia is a charitable non-profit website owned by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, while Wikia is an independent, for-profit company.
The report evidently mentions that Uncyclopedia covers Malaysian “history, culture, the political leaders, the government, the national song and the name / history of the national flag,” none of which is “correct”. They accuse the website of helping to reinforce a bad international image of their country.
There are no reports of the site being blocked from access within the country, only this statement, which urges Malaysians not to circulate the content.
Uncyclopedia’s article on Malaysia begins:
Essentially the penis of Asia which is located to the north of their cousins who live on an even smaller island Singapore, Malaysia (also known as Bolehland) is a young nation of diverse cultures and races such as F1 Formula-1 and Nascar. The timezone of Malaysia is unique because it follows the system of +1/+2 PMT (Predetermined Meeting Time) which is 1 or 2 hours later than PMT. Most foreigners have difficulty adjusting to this new timezone as they tend to show up 1 or 2 hours earlier than the local counterparts. The nation is moving forward with a vision towards becoming a developed nation by the year 2020, 3030, 4040 or whatever catchy number.
…Another common state that Malaysians have is denial (no lah, where got?), which incidentally, is a river in Egypt.
The site has fired back with a parody article posted at the site under their UnNews section, titled Uncyclopedia Internal Security Department warns on Malaysia. The article suggests that the “Internal Security Department of the Uncyclomedia Foundation,” which is a facetious and fictitious parent organization of Uncyclopedia, identifies Malaysia “as a dangerous country… It warned its people not to use the country today.”
There are forty-seven individual language editions of Uncyclopedia, including Tolololpedia, which is written in Bahasa Melayu, the Malay language. This is in addition to fictional “language” editions which include Oscar Wilde, Newspeak, N00b, White Supremacist, and Re: PharmaccgRy.
A peaceful anti-racism rally was held outside Sydney Town Hall on Sunday 18 December 2005
A number of rallies were held in Sydney on Sunday to protest against what they describe as racism in the community. The National Union of Students organised an event at Town Hall, and the Ted Noffs Foundation held an event in Belmore Park later in the day. About 2,000 people marched through Sydney, and there were also gatherings in Newcastle, Brisbane, and Melbourne.
Lebanese Australian student Chadi Sankary rejected alcohol as an excuse for racist and violent behaviour. “People are not willing to admit that this is about racism,” he said. “You can’t be under the influence of alcohol and paint your massive banners with racial slogans on them or you can’t make t-shirts while you’re drunk so it can’t be accepted as an excuse.”
Matt Noffs, of the Ted Noffs Foundation, said that the solution to racism lies with the people, not politicians. He also criticised the weeks police operation, saying that it will not provide a long-term solution. “I don’t feel that the responses that have been made during the week have actually helped the situation,” he said. “They might have suppressed some of the violence that is sure to happen in these situations anyway but they certainly don’t look at the solutions.”
Tim Longhurst, one of the organisers, said that the rally showed the true nature of Sydney as a tolerant city. “What we saw today wasn’t new. Sydney has always been a place where people do get along, and today they came out in force to show that,” Mr Longhurst said.
In a statement supporting the rally, Socialist Alliance linked the Cronulla riots to government policies and actions. “The riots reflect the rising racism in Australia, a tide that has been fostered by the Howard government’s policies and propaganda that criminalise and lock up refugees, dehumanise and bomb the Iraqi people, and define all Muslims and Middle-Eastern Australians as potential terrorists.”
One Sydney blogger criticised the rallies because they focused on racism against minority groups such as Lebanese, instead of racism in general. “They’re picking on only one face of the disgusting racism that has come to a boil in this city recently, and tried to say they’re taking a stand against racism,” he said, calling the rally “the racist anti-racism protest.”
Founder of the Victory Christian Centre, Billy Joe Daugherty died aged 57 on Sunday 4:40 am. This followed a short battle with lymphoma. The death was announced by church officials during morning services that day.
Adam Sanders, Daugherty’s son-in-law spoke about his final hours during the morning services saying, “We don’t sorrow as the world sorrows, as one without hope […] We celebrate his life, but at the same time there is sorrow, there is grieving”. His other son-in-law, Caleb Wehrli, spoke emotionally about how the family worshipped up until the end.
The Victory Christian Centre is one of the largest churches in Oklahoma with around seventeen thousand members.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma Daugherty also founded the Christian Centre in Tulsa and the Victory Bible Institute. His work included involvement with a missionary training centre which has sent over one thousand missionaries to several countries around the world. Author, with his wife, of several books he also appeared in his own TV show, Victory in Jesus.
Daugherty made national news in 2005 when punched at an altar call. The attack required two stitches, but Daugherty chose not to press charges despite visiting his assailant in jail where the inmate showed no remorse; Daugherty penned a book about this incident in his life.
The memorial service is planned for the 30th of this month.
This interview intends to provide some insight into OpenSync, an upcoming free unified data synchronization solution for free software desktops such as KDE, commonly used as part of the GNU/Linux operating system.
Hi Cornelius, Armin and Tobias. As you are now getting close to version 1.0 of OpenSync, which is expected to become the new synchronisation framework for KDE and other free desktops, we are quite interested in the merits it can provide for KDE users and for developers, as well as for the Open Source Community as a whole. So there’s one key-question before I move deeper into the details of OpenSync:
What does OpenSync accomplish, that no one did before?
Cornelius:
First of all it does its job of synchronizing data like addressbooks and calendars between desktop applications and mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones.
But the new thing about OpenSync is that it isn’t tied to a particular device or a specific platform. It provides an extensible and modular framework that is easy to adopt for application developers and people implementing support for syncing with mobile devices.
OpenSync is also independent of the desktop platform. It will be the common syncing backend for at least KDE and GNOME and other projects are likely to join. That means that the free desktop will have one common syncing solution. This is something really new.
How do the end-users profit from using synching solutions that interface with OpenSync as framework?
Cornelius:
First, the users will be able to actually synchronize all their data. By using one common framework there won’t be any “missing links”, where one application can sync one set of devices and another application a different one. With OpenSync all applications can sync all devices.
Second, the users will get a consistent and common user interface for syncing across all applications and devices. This will be much simpler to use than the current incoherent collection of syncing programs you need if you have more than the very basic needs.
How does OpenSync help developers with coding?
Cornelius:
It’s a very flexible and well-designed framework that makes it quite easy for developers to add support for new devices and new types of data. It’s also very easy to add support for OpenSync to applications.
The big achievement of OpenSync is that it hides all the gory details of syncing from the developers who work on applications and device support. That makes it possible for the developers to concentrate on their area of expertise without having to care what’s going on behind the scenes.
I have written quite a lot of synchronization code in the past. Trust me, it’s much better, if someone just takes care of it for you, and that’s what OpenSync does.
Tobias:
Another point to mention is the python wrapper for opensync, so you are not bound to C or C++, but can develop plugins in a high level scripting language.
Why should producers of portable devices get involved with your team?
Cornelius:
OpenSync will be the one common syncing solution for the free desktop. That means there is a single point of contact for device manufacturers who want to add support for their devices. That’s much more feasible than addressing all the different applications and solutions we had before. With OpenSync it hopefully will become interesting for manufacturers to officially support Linux for their devices.
Do you also plan to support applications of OpenSync in proprietary systems like OSX and Windows?
Cornelius:
OpenSync is designed to be cross-platform, so it is able to run on other systems like Windows. How well this works is always a question of people actually using and developing for this system. As far as I know there isn’t a real Windows community around OpenSync yet. But the technical foundation is there, so if there is somebody interested in working on a unified syncing solution on Windows, everybody is welcome to join the project.
What does your synchronisation framework do for KDE and for KitchenSync in particular?
Cornelius:
OpenSync replaces the KDE-specific synchronization frameworks we had before. Even in KDE we had several separate syncing implementations and with OpenSync we can get replace them with a common framework. We had a more generic syncing solution in KDE under development. This was quite similar from a design point of view to OpenSync, but it never got to the level of maturity we would have needed, because of lack of resources. As OpenSync fills this gap we are happy to be able to remove our old code and now concentrate on our core business.
What was your personal reason for getting involved with OpenSync?
Cornelius:
I wrote a lot of synchronization code in the past, which mainly came from the time where I was maintaining KOrganizer and working on KAddressBook. But this always was driven by necessity and not passion. I wanted to have all my calendar and contact data in one place, but my main objective was to work on the applications and user interfaces handling the data and not on the underlying code synchronizing the data.
So when the OpenSync project was created I was very interested. At GUADEC in Stuttgart I met with Armin, the maintainer of OpenSync, and we talked about integrating OpenSync with KDE. Everything seemed to fit together quite well, so at Linuxtag the same year we had another meeting with some more KDE people. In the end we agreed to go with OpenSync and a couple of weeks later we met again in Nuernberg for three days of hacking and created the KDE frontend for OpenSync. In retrospect it was a very pleasant and straightforward process to get where we are now.
Armin:
My reason to get involved (or better to start) OpenSync was my involvement with its predecessor Multisync. I am working as a system administrator for a small consulting company and so I saw some problems when trying to find a synchronization solution for Linux.
At that point I joined the Multisync project to implement some plugins that I thought would be nice to have. After some time I became the maintainer of the project. But I was unhappy with some technical aspects of the project, especially the tight coupling between the syncing logic and the GUI, its dependencies on GNOME libraries and its lack of flexibility.
Tobias:
Well, I have been a KDE PIM developer for several years now, so there was no way around getting in touch with synchronization and KitchenSync. Although I liked the idea of KitchenSync, I hated the code and the user interface […]. So when we discussed to switch to OpenSync and reimplementing the user interface, I volunteered immediately.
Can you tell us a bit about your further plans and ideas?
Cornelius:
The next thing will be the 1.0 release of OpenSync. We will release KitchenSync as frontend in parallel.
Armin:
There are of course a lot of things on my todo and my wishlist for opensync. For the near future the most important step is the 1.0 release, of course, where we still have some missing features in OpenSync as well as in the plugins.
One thing I would really like to see is a thunderbird plugin for OpenSync. I use thunderbird personally and would really like to keep my contacts up to date with my cellular, but I was not yet able to find the time to implement it.
Tobias:
One thing that would really rock in future versions of OpenSync is an automatic hardware detection mechanism, so when you plugin your Palm or switch on your bluetooth device, OpenSync will create a synchronization group automatically and ask the user to start syncing. To bring OpenSync to the level of _The Syncing Solution [tm]_ we must reduce the necessary configuration to a minimum.
What was the most dire problem you had to face when creating OpenSync and how did you face it?
Cornelius:
Fortunately the problems which I personally would consider to be dire are solved by the implementation of OpenSync which is well hidden from the outside world and [they are] an area I didn’t work on 😉
Armin:
I guess that I am the right person to answer this question then 🙂
The most complicated part of OpenSync is definitely the format conversion, which is responsible for converting the format of one device to the format that another device understands.
There are a lot of subsystems in this format conversion that make it so complex, like conversion path searching, comparing items, detection of mime types and last but not least the conversion itself. So this was a hard piece of work.
What was the greatest moment for you?
Cornelius:
I think the greatest moment was when, after three days of concentrated hacking, we had a first working version of the KDE frontend for OpenSync. This was at meeting at the SUSE offices in Nuernberg and we were able to successfully do a small presentation and demo to a group of interested SUSE people.
Armin:
I don’t remember a distinct “greatest moment”. But what is a really great feeling is to see that a project catches on, that other people get involved, use the code you have written and improve it in ways that you haven’t thought of initially.
Tobias:
Hmm, also hacking on OpenSync/KitcheSync is much fun in general, the greatest moment was when the new KitchenSync frontend synced two directories via OpenSync the first time. But it was also cool when we managed to get the IrMC plugin working again after porting it to OpenSync.
As we now know the worst problem you faced and your greatest moment, the only one missing is: What was your weirdest experience while working on OpenSync?
Cornelius:
Not directly related to OpenSync, but pretty weird was meeting a co-worker at the Amsterdam airport when returning from the last OpenSync meeting. I don’t know how high the chance is to meet somebody you know on a big random airport not related at all to the places where you or the other person live, but it was quite surprising.
Tobias:
Since my favorite language is C++, I was always confused how people can use plain C for such a project, half the time your are busy with writing code for allocating/freeing memory areas. Nevertheless Armin did a great job and he is always a help for solving strange C problems 🙂
Now I’d like to move on to some more specific questions about current and planned abilities of OpenSync. As first, I’ve got a personal one:
I have an old iPod sitting around here. Can I or will I be able to use a program utilizing OpenSync to synchronize my calendars, contacts and music to it?
Cornelius:
I’m not aware of any iPod support for OpenSync up to now, but if it doesn’t exist yet, why not write it? OpenSync makes this easy. This is a chance for everybody with the personal desire to sync one device or another to get involved.
Armin:
I dont think that there is iPod support yet for OpenSync. But it would definitely be possible to use OpenSync for this task. So if someone would like to implement an iPod plugin, I would be glad to help 🙂
Which other devices do you already support?
Cornelius:
At this time, OpenSync supports Palms, SyncML and IrMC capable devices.
Which programs already implement OpenSync and where can we check back to find new additions?
Cornelius:
On the application side there is support for Evolution [GNOME] and Kontact with KitchenSync [KDE] on the frontend side and the backend side and some more. I expect that further applications will adopt OpenSync once the 1.0 version is released.
Armin:
Besides kitchensync there already are a command line tool and a port of the multisync GUI. Aside from the GUIs, I would really like to see OpenSync being used in other applications as well. One possibility for example would to be integrate OpenSync into Evolution to give users the possibility to synchronize their devices directly from this application. News can generally be found on the OpenSync web site www.opensync.org.
It is time to give the developers something to devour, too. I’ll keep this as a short twice-fold technical dive before coming to the takeoff question, even though I’m sure there’s information for a double-volume book on technical subleties.
As first dive: How did you integrate OpenSync in KitchenSync, viewed from the coding side?
Cornelius:
OpenSync provides a C interface. We wrapped this with a small C++ library and put KitchenSync on top. Due to the object oriented nature of the OpenSync interfaces this was quite easy.
Recently I also started to write a D-Bus frontend for OpenSync. This also is a nice way to integrate OpenSync which provides a wide variety of options regarding programming languages and system configurations.
And for the second, deeper dive:
Can you give us a quick outline of those inner workings of OpenSync, from the developers view, which make OpenSync especially viable for application in several different desktop environments?
Cornelius:
That’s really a question for Armin. For those who are interested I would recommend to have a look at the OpenSync website. There is a nice white paper about the internal structure and functionality of OpenSync.
Armin:
OpenSync consists of several parts:
First there is the plugin API which defines what functions a plugin has to implement so that OpenSync can dlopen() it. There are 2 types of plugins:
A sync plugin which can synchronize a certain device or application and which provides functions for the initialization, handling the connection to a device and reading and writing items. Then there is a format plugin which defines a format and how to convert, compare and detect it.
The next part is a set of helper functions which are provided to ease to programming of synchronization plugins. These helper functions include things like handling plugin config files, HashTables which can be used to detect changes in sets of items, functions to detect when a resync of devices is necessary etc.
The syncing logic itself resides in the sync engine, which is a separate part. The sync engine is responsible for deciding when to call the connect function of a plugin, when to read or write from it. The engine also takes care of invoking the format conversion functions so that each plugin gets the items in its required format.
If you want more information and details about the inner workings of OpenSync, you should really visit the opensync.org website or ask its developers.
To add some more spice for those of our readers, whose interest you just managed to spawn (or to skyrocket), please tell us where they can get more information on the OpenSync Framework, how they can best meet and help you and how they can help improving sync-support for KDE by helping OpenSync.
Cornelius:
Again, the OpenSync web site is the right source for information. Regarding the KDE side, the kde-pim@kde.org mailing list is probably the right address. At the moment the most important help would be everything which gets the OpenSync 1.0 release done.
[And even though] I already said it, it can’t be repeated too often: OpenSync will be the one unified syncing solution for the free desktop. Cross-device, cross-platform, cross-desktop.
It’s the first time I feel well when thinking about syncing 😉.
Armin:
Regarding OpenSync, the best places to ask would be the opensync mailing lists at sourceforge or the #opensync irc channel on the freenode.net servers.
There are always a lot of things where we could need a helping hand and where we would be really glad to get some help. So everyone who is interested in OpenSync is welcome to join.
Many thanks for your time!
Cornelius:
Thanks for doing the interview. It’s always fun to talk about OpenSync, because it’s really the right thing.
Armin:
Thank you for taking your time and doing this interview. I really appreciate your help!
Tobias:
Thanks for your work. Publication and marketing is something that is really missing in the open source community. We have nice software but nobody knows 😉
Further Information on OpenSync can be found on the OpenSync Website: www.opensync.org
File photo of McDonald’s in Times SquareImage: Sallicio..
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued proposed calorie labeling rules requiring most retail food vendors to display the calorie counts in items on their menus and menu boards. The proposed rules, issued Friday and expected to be finalized in 2012, would apply to most restaurants, snack bars, vending machines, coffee shops, drive-through restaurants, and convenience and grocery stores.
The US Congress required the rules in the health-care reform law passed in 2010. The rules proposed by the FDA must undergo a public comment period before they are finalized and take effect, said Michael R. Taylor, Deputy Director for Foods at the FDA.
The proposed regulations pertain to businesses devoting more than 50 percent of their floor space to the sale of food or that consider themselves restaurants, specifically food-selling chains with at least 20 stores nationally. Included are candy stores, bakeries, and ice-cream parlors.
The FDA’s proposed guidelines specify that chains post the calorie counts of foods and drinks on menus and menu boards or next to the food item, such as at a salad bar. The menu is to prominently exhibit the calorie content of each item in a way customers can see easily, giving them the same information packaged foods prepared at home currently provide. The information must be displayed in “clear and conspicuous” print and colors.
Giving consumers clear nutritional information makes it easier for them to choose healthier options that can help fight obesity and make us all healthier.
Many cities and states have passed laws requiring calorie labeling on menus, beginning with New York City in 2008. California implemented a similar law in January, although many counties are waiting for the release of the federal guidelines before they begin enforcement. Some fast-food chains there, such as McDonald’s and Starbucks, are displaying calorie counts on menus in some of their stores.
The rules are intended to curb the national obesity epidemic since, according to FDA estimates, one third of the calories people consume yearly come from food eaten out. In a statement issued yesterday, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services said, “Giving consumers clear nutritional information makes it easier for them to choose healthier options that can help fight obesity and make us all healthier.”
Excluded from the rules are businesses whose primary product is not food sales but that sell it, such as bowling alleys, airports and airplanes, amusement parks, hotels and movie theaters. Alcohol is also excluded.